


No Assembly Required

by aelysian



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-13
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2017-12-29 08:42:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 28,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1003342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aelysian/pseuds/aelysian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of oneshots and drabbles. Ratings and pairings vary. Spoilers up to Born To Run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Infiltration I & II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something of an aimless post-ep tag to Allison from Palmdale in two parts that are vaguely related. First part is set in the present, the second part is set in the future. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2008

Humans, Cameron was told, were governed by their nature. It defined what and why they did. It was what made Derek Reese shoot first and ask questions later. What made Sarah Connor do anything to protect her son, even if that meant living with a girl-sized terminator. What made a sixteen year old John Connor stroke her hair while waiting for her to reboot.

Cameron was governed by her programming. It told her what to do, how and when to act. It gave her boundaries, dictated what she could and could not do.

She was a blank slate, observant and acutely aware, made to adapt and to mirror others. She took lives and made them her own, took truths and made them her lies. She gathered pieces of humanity and reshaped them around herself, a perfect façade for anyone who didn’t look hard enough.

_“You seem different.”_

_“I am.”_

 

 

She heard him coming up the stairs and accurately predicted that his path would end at her bedroom door. He didn’t knock and she expected that too.

“Hey. You want to tell me about what happened today?”

“No.” She didn’t want to talk about today. The memories were vivid and sharp now that they had been uncovered; she replayed them over and over, wondering how they had been transferred to her own memory storage. How they had been lost.

She wondered what else was hidden inside of her, what other inaccessible files and fragments were buried within her own artificial consciousness. What else the John Connor of the future had suppressed when he ripped her chip from its port and changed her.

Whatever was there, trapped inside her coltan skull, she didn’t want this John Connor to know about. She didn’t want him to know about Allison Young, the human whose face and life she had taken. About Jody, whose necklace she still wore, a lie around her neck. Or about her, Cameron, where and what she had come from. She didn’t want him to know about the hours she had spent believing she was something else, something human. Deficient.

He would not trust her then, and the mission required that he did.

_“That must be why John Connor chose you. I admire him. His determination, his spirit, his fearlessness. I’d like to meet him.”_

 

 

“You didn’t know who you were.”

“There was an error in my CPU. I fixed it.” It was the answer he expected and the answer she gave him.

“You called yourself Allison.”

She remembered Allison now. A girl of the Resistance, shivering as she looked upon her own face, her own pretty hair. The look on her battered face when she said John Connor’s name; she dedicated that expression, every expression, every intonation of her voice to her memory, to be mimicked and used later. It was what she did.

_“I love you John. I love you and you love me.”_

She remembered her when she looked at Jody and her pretty hair. When Jody lied.

_“Tell me about your past.”_

She didn’t like it when they lied.

 

 

“Who is Allison?”

“I don’t know.” She met his gaze without wavering, without blinking.

“If I ask you if you’re lying, will you tell me the truth?”

“If I say yes, how will you know that I’m not lying?”

He threw his hands up and expelled carbon dioxide in a rush and turned away. She understood this to mean that he was exasperated, irritated with her. It also meant that he would not continue to question her.

John Connor would not make an effective terminator.

 

 

_“Cameron.” His fingers were coarse against the unblemished skin of her jaw, but gentle as they turned her face toward him. “Ready?”_

_She stepped onto the dais, her hyper sensitive hearing picking up the beginning whirr of the machine that would take her to a foreign past. She looked at him, registered and discarded the familiar command._

_“Yes. I’m ready.”_

_“What is your mission?”_

_The hesitation in her answer was imperceptible to human ears. “Protect John Connor.”_

 

 

She was an infiltrator, and the most complex one of her class. She was singular, unique. She could lower her eyes and give a half smile. She could giggle and whisper girlish secrets in the dark. She could lie.

_“About important things?”_

_“Yes. Important things.”_

 

**II**

It’s a conversation they’ve had before and one they’ll have again.

“I don’t want to hear it, Derek.”

“Two dozen men, John.  Dead.  Sent to their deaths for nothing.”

He meets his uncle’s glare, both refusing to back down or look away.  “Not for nothing.”

“For what, then?  You tell them they’re fighting Skynet, they’re fighting for their families, for freedom.  But you and I both know that those men died today because of you.  You and your sick obsession–” he stops himself from saying the words that make him sick to even think, grinds his teeth until they ache.

“I need her.”

“She was a machine, John.  And she’s dead.  She’s not coming back, and if anyone here finds out about these little side missions you’re running, you’re going to have a god damned mutiny on your hands.”

 

 

Six weeks later and he’s standing in a corner of the room they’ve designated as the mess hall, watching the bustle of tired bodies fuelled by scanty food and hope.  He can hear laughter somewhere and wonders if they’ll still remember how to do that in the years to come.

And then he sees her.  Just a glimpse through the crowd, but it’s enough. 

For a moment, he can’t move.  He doesn’t want to move.  It’s easier to stay still, to watch her.  Until she looks at him, as if aware of his eyes on her.  Then her attention slides away, distracted by the girl she’s sitting with.  And he doesn’t understand.

He waits until she gets up to leave.  She pauses where he’s standing by the doors and he can hear his name being whispered.

“You’ve been watching me,” she says bluntly, and he wonders if she knows who he is.

But he’s never been one for formalities, and it doesn’t matter, because she sounds exactly the same as she did the last time he saw her and it’s so damn familiar, he can’t help but reach out for her, to make sure she’s real.  He doesn't stop to wonder what a terminator would be doing eating dinner in the middle of a Resistance camp.

“Cameron, it’s me.”

She’s confused and he’s seen that expression before, on a face that is not this face of a girl that wasn’t a girl.

“My name’s Allison.”

He knew what she would say an instant before she said it, but It still feels like the bottom of his world is falling away and he swallows hard, as a thousand puzzle pieces he hadn’t realized he’d been collecting fall into place.

“Allison.”  He closes his eyes tightly, struggling to come to terms with all the answers to questions he’s never asked.  He wishes he had.  “Where were you from, Allison?  Before Judgment Day.”

Her gaze flicks over the name on his uniform, recognizes its importance.  She doesn’t know why he’s talking to her.  “Palmdale.”

He laughs but it isn’t any kind of laugh she’s ever heard before and he looks away.  And she doesn’t know why, but she reaches for his hand.

There’s a moment of hesitation and she kicks herself for being stupid enough to act on her instincts.  But then his hand closes over hers and he doesn’t let go.

 

 

“God _damn_ it!”

The heavy metal desk turns over with a clatter that echoes off the steel-lined walls.   A vicious kick sends the desk lamp flying, the precious bulb smashing.

John Connor doesn’t care about the waste, or about what his lieutenants are thinking of him as they stand at attention.

Finally, he is still, breathing heavily, his dirty cracked nails digging into his palms.

“Survivors?”

They know this question well.  “Six.”

“Make sure there’s place for them in the infirmary.”

He glances up at them, dismissing them silently.  The heavy metal door creaks as they leave.  All, save one.

Derek Reese watches his general dissolve into his twenty-year-old nephew, watches as he collapses in an empty corner, tired and too old for his age.

“We didn’t find her body.”

“We won’t.”  He wishes they had.

God, he wishes.  He wishes Cameron had told him about this, had seen fit to tell him something.  But then, even terminators might have a sense of self-preservation.  And Cameron had always been different.

He wishes he had protected her better, knowing what he did.  He wishes the fate of Allison Young wasn’t as inevitable as that of Kyle Reese.

He wishes he wasn’t such a bastard, cursed to destroy the lives of everyone that cared about him.

She smiled at him when he sent her to her death.  He wonders where she is now, how much time she has left.

 

 

A week later, Allison returns to camp, the familiar shiny bracelet on her wrist.  She finds him, and with tears in her eyes, she swears she didn’t tell the machines a thing, that they’re safe, he’s safe.

She’s perfect.

He kisses her.  And a second later, he jams the live wire against her head and watches her collapse.

One hundred and twenty seconds.


	2. Time and Time Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They twist and bend time over and over. Five different lifetimes.
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2008

**One**

 

Technically, the first time he sees her is when she arrives at their camp, two weeks after Judgment Day.  His gaze sweeps over the survivors, sweeps over her, unaware that she’s looking right back at him.

He isn’t the one to register her, to assign her a bunk, to give her that weary smile of welcome.  He doesn’t know the name Allison Young.  
 

 

*

 

  
He notices her after a recon mission gone bad.  She’s fierce and brave and when she tackles him to the ground, earth and fire raining down on them, she earns herself two broken ribs and a nasty burn.

_You saved my life_ , he says later when she’s being patched up across from him in the infirmary.

_Then I guess we’re even_.  She grins and he feels a little more alive than he did a minute ago. 

Twelve hours later, she gets a transfer order to the Connor camp.  
 

 

*

 

  
He can’t remember what it’s like to sleep alone anymore and he doesn’t want to.  She makes sure he doesn’t forget how to smile, how to live, how to love, because he does.  Love her.

And she loves him and it’s like everything good left in him is wrapped up in this one person.

He thinks it’s ironic that he had to wait for the apocalypse to find this.  She says they would have found each other anyway.

Six months later she goes missing.

 

**Two**

  
He sits in the corner and watches Cameron watching the blonde pregnant woman they’re stuck with.  It’s hot and dark and he’s already wishing he hadn’t refused Cameron’s offer to fix the situation.  But for all he knows, she’d consider ripping her way out of the elevator shaft more efficient than trying to reroute power to their stationary car.

She breaks the silence.  “I’m Cameron.  This is my brother John.”

The woman manages a wavering smile.  She’s sweaty and she needs a bathroom like, _now_. 

“Claire.  Claire Young.”  
 

*

  
He tells himself that he’s watching them to make sure Cameron doesn’t glitch again and not because of the expression on her face as she gingerly places her hand over Claire’s belly.  He doesn’t recognize the girl – machine – sitting next to him.

She inhales sharply and smiles; he’s never seen her smile like that before.  “She kicked.”

Claire laughs.  “She kicks so much, I think she’s practicing to become a soccer player or something.”

“She’ll be brave,” Cameron says solemnly.  “A fighter.”

He wonders what the fuck she’s doing.  
 

*

  
Night had fallen by the time they’re released and she’s leading the way home.  Sarah is going to be pissed.

She stops.  Waits for him.

“She’s going to name her Allison.”

He shoves his hands in his pockets.  “Pretty name.”

Three years later; Claire Young and her daughter don’t survive Judgment Day.  She doesn’t know why, but the knowledge makes her feel a little more alone.  She doesn’t tell John.

 

**Three**  
 

They’re on their way to the command centre when he sees her double walking toward them.  A quick glance to his right tells him that she’s seen her too.  There’s no surprise on her face and he wonders if she’s been waiting for this.

He knows who she is, who she was, in some other lifetime.

He won’t let that happen this time.  She won’t let it.

They can change the future.  
 

*

  
Allison Young does not rise high in the ranks of the Resistance.  She isn’t part of any daring missions.  She doesn’t have a piece of shrapnel buried in her right leg and she doesn’t walk with a slight limp. 

She’s never targeted or captured.  She’s never interrogated by the enemy and she doesn’t know what it’s like to have your life stolen away from you.

She doesn’t know about the machine that shares her face.  She never meets John Connor.  
 

*

  
When she’s nineteen, she falls in love.  At twenty, she gets married in the dining hall and someone manages to concoct something that passes for wine.  Her husband laughs and lets her dance him around the room.

When an operation goes horribly wrong, her infirmary is bursting with the injured and dying.  She stumbles back to her bunk covered with blood and sweat and she’s never hated the machines more.

She’s pregnant at twenty two, and prays her child will see a life better than her own.  The baby goes without a name for two weeks until she overhears the latest stories of the Connor camp.  One name sticks out and she’s heard it before.

She names her daughter Cameron.

 

**Four**

  
The world is ending.  Billions are dying.  His destiny is at his doorstep.

There’s a four year old girl sleeping on his cot, her little arms wrapped around a singed teddy bear that’s missing an ear.  Her parents are dead, but that’s nothing new anymore.

When they found her, she clung to Cameron with a stubbornness possessed only by children and Terminators.  Dirty and crying, she buried her face in her shoulder, arms twining around her neck, desperate to hold onto her new saviour.

_Hold on tight_ , she told the little human.  She glanced at John; he nodded and turned to lead the way out.  _We’ll take you somewhere safe_.

  
*

  
When she wakes, it’s dark and quiet and she wants her mommy to stroke her hair, kiss her head, and tell her that everything’s going to be okay.  Except mommy isn’t here and she’s alone in the dark. 

“Allison?”  She opens her eyes and recognizes the lady that saved her.  “Are you okay?”

Her bottom lip trembles and there’s a fresh wave of tears.  “I’m scared.  And I want my mommy.”

Cool fingers brush the damp hair away from her face.  “Don’t be scared.  I’m going to protect you.”  
 

*

  
She stays with a woman who’s raising two other children her age; none of them related.  When they come to see her, she lifts her hands to them, uncaring that she’s getting a little too big to be picked up.  It doesn’t matter because Cameron can lift her with ease, and she likes the face John makes when he hauls her into his arms.

She likes to rest her head on her chest, inhale the familiar smell of her skin, and wrap herself around the person she trusts more than anyone.  Her hair is soft and smooth as it slips through her fingers.  “Your hair is so pretty, Cammy.”

Cameron wonders if this is what pain feels like.

 

**Five**

  
Judgment Day doesn’t come, but no one knows what the world so narrowly avoided.

It’s funny, but achieving the goal they’ve dedicated their lives to has left them adrift.  Sarah doesn’t know how to raise a son instead of a solider and Derek can’t stop looking over his shoulder every three seconds.  John doesn’t know how to imagine a future with endless choices and Cameron’s something that shouldn’t exist but does.

They fall into a strange rhythm, tentatively finding their place in a world they’ve never lived in.  
 

*

  
She has her sixth birthday at the park and sees a boy riding a silver mountain bike.  She wants that bike.  Two days later it appears, abandoned on the front lawn.

On her twelfth birthday, she doesn’t look when she crosses the street.  She hears the blaring horn and feels an arm around her waist, pulling her to safety.  By the time she stops shaking, she’s alone again.  She doesn’t notice the silver bracelet that appears on her wrist until she gets home.

When she’s fourteen, her parents tell her she has to put a pause on her dancing “just for a little while” because money is tight.  A week later she turns fifteen and the studio tells her that her fees have been paid anonymously. 

At sixteen, she catches a glimpse of a girl who could be her twin.  She stops dead in her tracks, searching the crowds.  It’s futile; the girl is nowhere to be seen and she wonders if she imagined her.

Strange things always happen on July 22nd.  
 

*

  
Her mom says she’s been touched by an angel and her dad says she has the luck of the devil.

She thinks it’s fate.


	3. Subplot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Heroes are built, not born. Episode tag for Goodbye to All That.
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2008

Marty was right when he said she sucked at being a mom. She’s always known it, but John doesn’t complain. Then again, he’s never known anything else.

It’s too late for her to change now, even if she knew how. He’s too old to be tucked into bed with a bedtime story and a kiss. He’s seen too much to listen to fantastic stories about faraway lands; the pretty lies are too airy and sugar sweet for her tongue.

She can’t tease him about girls, not even the strange blonde one he seems to like. Her entire life revolves around protecting him, even from the parts of normal life she knows he’s craving.

But he’s not normal. They’re not normal.

She reminds herself of that when she watches the bus pull away. Cameron was right: Marty was not a mission priority. Her son is the priority. The only priority.

There’s no use in imagining what life could have been like.

 

 

She’s waiting, looking out the window, when they return. They’re tired and worn, but who isn’t? Her eyes lock onto her son, scanning him for injury, before settling on his face. She knows that expression. She sees it every time she looks at Derek Reese. It’s settling on her son’s features, hardening into a grim mask he won’t be able to take off.

They enter the house without a word and she watches him disappear up into the second floor, pausing only to glance at the woman he still calls Mom.

She won’t ask what happened. Derek meets her gaze as he trudges past her to the back of the house, and she’s just relieved that she’s sharing the burden of making a hero.

Still, the guilt gnaws, somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach, and she can’t make it go away.

 

 

When night falls and Cameron returns, silent and stoic as ever, she locks the doors and windows, peering out into the darkness as if she can spot any threats with her weak human eyes.

She’s running out of things to teach her son. Her jaw clenches and she reaches for her gun as she makes her last circuit of the house for the night.

She isn’t a good mother. The least she can do is be a good protector.

 

 

When everything is quiet, she slips into John’s room. He doesn’t wake, not even when she bumps into the dresser, and some part of her adds that to the list. She kisses his forehead and adjusts the sheets around him. He looks like her son when he sleeps, she thinks.

Cameron watches from the doorway.

***

The John Connor she is sent back in time for was born in 1984. His birth is easily catalogued and referenced. It has a day and a time, to be marked annually with cake, congratulations, and the odd explosion. This is the John that Sarah Connor knows.

The birth of the John Connor that Cameron knows is less than precise. He is half-formed now, in transition. He needs to be helped, guided.

Built, is the word his future self uses. Like her. Built by the people who love them, he says.

In the future, she does not understand this; Skynet does not love her. Here, in the past, she wonders if this has something to do with her fragmented memories of Allison Young.

 

 

Find John Connor. Protect John Connor. Prepare John Connor.

She reminds herself of her mandate when she follows them around the academy, hidden in the shadows.

She wonders if Derek Reese received the same directions. It is possible, but unlikely, she decides; he is continually surprised by the younger version of his general. He does not know the details of his life as she does. He has not been briefed, has not been given the instructions she has.

And yet, Cameron is discovering that her mission and that of Derek Reese are beginning to coincide, even if the human soldier doesn’t know it yet.

They are stealing Sarah’s son and making him into a man prepared for a future she’s still trying to prevent.

She wonders if John knew that all of this would happen.

 

 

He told her she was different and she believed him. She tells him she’s different and he believes her.

He told her he would be angry, frustrated. Rebellious. She was to guide him, push him, put a gun into his hand and coltan around his heart.

He told her that in time, he would come to look at her the same way he did. He told her to be patient.

He told her that he would be lost, looking for someone to save him.

He didn’t tell her how hard it would be to keep herself from being that someone.

 

 

When the T-888 advances on John, when it chases him, her mission priorities reassert themselves, forcing her to execute a manual override. She watches, obscured by the foliage, when they burn the damaged cyborg, when they trudge away with Bedel in tow. She leaves finger-sized indentations on the tree she’s gripping, but she is satisfied.

_“Hey! It’s me! Connor! John Connor!”_

She smiles imperceptibly on the drive back to the house they have taken for their own. _Soon._


	4. Damning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John asks Cameron about the future
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2008

She’s standing outside again, staring into the distance.  He wonders what she’s looking at, what – if anything – she’s thinking.  He wonders if she even thinks at all, or if she merely analyzes, if there’s a spark of awareness inside that metal skull.  He wonders if he really wants to know the answer.

“The sun will set in seventeen minutes.”  She doesn’t turn to look at him; she doesn’t need to do anything to know he’s there.  He’s watched her a hundred times but this is the first time he joins her. 

He calls her Cameron in his mind, but it’s just a name, because he doesn’t know how to think about her, how to begin to understand the enigma, the impossibility that is this…girl standing next to him.

“That first day.  In 1999.  You were different.”

“Yes.”

“What happened to that?”

“That was a personality matrix designed to optimize infiltration of an adolescent social setting.”

It’s the answer he’s expecting, but not the one he wants.  “You know, it would be a lot easier for everybody if you acted more like that.  Especially in public.”

She tears her gaze away from the horizon to glance at him.  “It wouldn’t be real.”

He can’t help the derisive snort that escapes him.  “Nothing about you is real.”

“I am not organic, but I am not imaginary.”

“Fine,” he concedes.  “But you’re a blank slate.  Your actions are dictated by programming, pre-defined algorithms, creating personas to accomplish your goals.  Underneath all of that, there’s…nothing.”

“There is me,” she insists and to be honest, he’d kind of forgotten she was there.  “I am real.”

Her voice does not change – the pitch, volume, and inflection remain precisely the same – but there is a steely conviction there that he’s never heard before.  If she was a normal girl, he would have worried that her feelings were hurt.

But she isn’t and he can’t help but try to push her, just to see what would happen.  “How do you know?”

The sun is a bloody red and low in the sky.  “You told me.”

He gives her a hard look but if she notices, she doesn’t show it.  “The other me.”

“Yes.”

“Do you lie to him?”

“No.”

He believes her and that just pisses him off even more.  “But you lie to me.”

“Sometimes.”

 “Why?”  He grabs her shoulder, forces her to face him (he doesn’t want to think about the fact that he didn’t force her so much as she let him).  “What the hell makes him so damn special?”

There’s something different in her eyes, but she turns away, back to the house before he can even try to understand it. 

“The sun has set,” she informs him, as if the falling darkness isn’t enough of a clue.  “We should go.”

Night is when they shed the façade of normalcy, when they aren’t siblings and their name isn’t Baum.  This is when they do their real work.

***

His bedroom door is open and she pauses in her tireless circuit of the house; John had taken to closing his door at night and she understands this to be a request for privacy.  Although sometimes he closes the door even though Riley is there and he is not alone, which she thinks is counter-productive.

When she enters the dark room, her balancing mechanisms compensate for imperfectly laid floorboards, making her approach perfectly silent.  Her efforts are unnecessary; John is awake.

He looks up at her from the too small bed, the patterned sheets tangled around his legs.  Satisfied that he is safe, if not asleep as he should be, she moves to leave.

“You never answered me.”

“Why are you asking so many questions?” she counters, though her voice conveys no sense of irritation or impatience.  He wishes it did.

“Don’t I have a right to know something about the great leader I’m supposed to become?” 

She turns to face him, perfectly straight and still.  “Everything we do, whether we stop Skynet or not, has the potential to change the future.  You are already eight years younger than you should be.  I do not know what other effects the jump to this time, or what we have done here, have had.”

Something changes in the way she’s standing, in the set of her features and look in her eyes.  “The John Connor that I knew, the future from which I came, no longer exists,” she says quietly.  “But he is – was – everything.”

She’s as adrift as he is, he thinks.  As lost and disconnected, guided only by her mission. 

The words escape from their hiding place inside of him, his tongue betraying the secret thought that bubbles to the surface every time she speaks of the future.  “You love him.”

Just for a second, he swears her eyes burn blue, but it’s fleeting and the next moment he tells himself he’s imagining things, reminding himself of her real nature, because the look on her face is anything but mechanical.  He blames it on the shadows.

Her mouth twitches and even though she’s looking at him, he’s suddenly sure it isn’t him she’s seeing, and there’s something heavy settling on his chest.   “He saved me.”

It isn’t an admission, nor is it a denial.  But she doesn’t remind him that she’s a machine, doesn’t tell him that she doesn’t know love.

Taking his silence as a sign that the conversation is over, Cameron steps back and away, preparing to resume her patrol.  Her fingers brush the doorframe and her gaze lingers on him. 

“Goodnight, John.”

He can’t say the words back because he knows now who she was pleading with that day, his birthday.  He knows who she saw in those moments before he snatched her life away, who she cried out to in her desperation.  Who made her more human than he could have imagined.  _He saved me._

He saved her and she’s saving him and it’s just another tangled mess that ends with him alone.  Lost to want something he can’t have, to wish he (she… _they_ ) could re-write who they are and who they’ll become, to love someone who will never love him back.

She’s damning him and she doesn’t even know it.


	5. Perfect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2008

She is perfect.

She will never have a sunburn or a zit, will never freckle or bruise.  Her body will never hint at her secrets; there will be no scars to keep as reminders.  (She cannot forget.)

She’s exactly the right height to rest her head against his shoulder, exactly the right size to fit into his arms, exactly the right shape to curl up against at night.

She could kill him before he could blink but she doesn’t and she won’t.  She would die for him without hesitation.

She smiles rarely, but they aren’t the kind of people that have much to smile about.

She’s awkward and infuriating but sometimes she understands him better than anyone else.

She’s curious and relentless and beautiful and everything he can imagine wanting.

She isn’t human and he doesn’t pretend otherwise (and machines don’t feel but she seems different) so when he says I love you and she rests her hand over his heart, it’s enough.

Enough is good, he thinks.  Enough is perfect.


	6. Evolving in Circles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When John finally realizes his destiny, Cameron's left alone to figure out her evolving humanity. And Derek Reese becomes a sort-of friend
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2008

Her evolution is slow, but John is patient

 

She learns anger first, when the destruction of her favourite pair of jeans is more than an inconvenience; she destroys the T-888’s chip without hesitation, and when John frowns at the useless bit of metal she hands him, she does not apologize.  Later, she wonders why she has favourites at all.

 

She likes dancing and skating.  She tells him she likes the way they make her feel.  Light, she says.  Freed from the realities of her construction.  He tells her that she’s smiling and she asks him what that means.

 

When Sarah Connor is killed, her tear ducts activate without her command and she feels something that she cannot describe.  Until she hears strange noises coming from John’s room and she slips in to investigate.  What she finds is called grief.  He reaches for her and she knows he will teach her this too.

 

But he cannot teach her how to laugh, or how to empathize.  He cannot teach her love.  He cannot teach her hope.  He tells her that he has enough for the both of them.  He doesn’t need to teach her how to lie.

 

 

There comes a day when he convinces himself that she is limited, that the slowly evolving emotional range of his best friend will never be advanced enough to understand what he tries to teach her.  The truth is that she is a child, tentative and curious, and he is a soldier, a leader, and what he needs is something she cannot yet give him.  He convinces himself that he can no longer wait for her.

 

_“I love you.”  This isn’t the first time he tells her, but his mouth has never been so cruel and he’s never looked so hurt.  “And you…you love dancing and you love shotguns and you love the god damned squirrels in the park, but me…I fucking love you, Cameron.  But you don’t, do you?  You can’t.”_

 

There comes a day when she tells him she doesn’t want to be human.  Her eyes are wide and trusting, believing that he will understand, because he always does.  She isn’t human and she doesn’t want to be.  She simply is, and that should be enough for him.  She doesn’t understand why he would want her to change, to be something she is not.  She doesn’t understand why he turns away from her.

 

_“John?  John, please.  Please, John, I don’t – I can’t – John, why are you – I don’t understand, John,” she struggles to find the words he wants to hear, the words that will keep him here, safe with her.  “John?”_

 

The humans call it Judgment Day.

 

 

***

 

 

She blends in, because that is what she does.  She alters her biological processes and bruises and scars start appearing on her unmarked flesh.  They call her weird, odd, sometimes a freak, but they never question her humanity and that is sufficient.

 

“We’re two of a kind now.”

 

She looks up from the elaborate blueprints and plans that encompass her rickety desk to stare at the man leaning against her doorway.  His words carry the slightest tang of bitterness, but she doesn’t understand.

 

“Alone,” he says.

 

“Yes.”  Yes, they are alone.  Without John, they are alone, two people displaced and struggling.  Kyle Reese is not this Derek’s brother and John Connor has no known living family.  She is feeling things she should not, things she is struggling to make sense of, to control the evolving mess that is neither human nor machine.  This is not the future they know.

 

This is what binds them together, connected by something that no longer exists, tinged by faded animosity.

 

“I am lonely,” she says to him, because John isn’t there anymore.

 

His eyes leave the wall, find hers and she recognizes sympathy in his face.  “We all are.  But for you and me…John’s been the center of our lives for the last ten years.  And now…”

 

He doesn’t finish his sentence but she can extrapolate what he would have said from the indisputable truth that eats at them both, and she says it for him.  “He doesn’t need us.  Not like before.”

 

John has soldiers and advisors and the remnants of species ready to do what they’ve been doing for more than a decade.  And Kate, she adds silently, even if she can’t quite understand why the human woman comes to mind.

 

“Two of a kind,” she echoes.

 

They develop a strange kind of companionship.

 

 

***

 

 

She tells herself that he is busy, that he isn’t deliberately sending her out for longer and longer assignments, that this time, he will smile at her when she returns.  She tells herself that he will come to see her soon, come to show her new things and discuss his plans with her the way he used to.

 

On the day they happen to be in the same debriefing session, when his eyes find her in the crowd, when his gaze moves on without hesitation, she tells herself that she feels nothing.

 

She volunteers for a mission the humans call suicidal but the word means nothing to her; she cannot self-terminate.

 

She is captured and imprisoned, and when they brand her wrist with a barcode, she suspects that Skynet – this Skynet – does not recognize what she is.  It’s inexplicable and damn near impossible but she doesn’t want to consider what it might mean.  She doesn’t notice the bits of memory and data missing from her own mind.

 

 

***

 

 

Her tiny room is untouched, despite the fact that she’s been gone for months.  They should have assumed she was dead and reallocated the space.  She wonders who kept it for her.

 

She’s aware of the approaching footsteps well before the metal hatch creaks open, is careful not to let her disappointment show when Derek appears.  He grasps her shoulders, stares into her eyes as if he can see into her CPU.  The fact that she’s alive, that she isn’t going on a murderous rampage…he doesn’t understand it either, but he doesn’t pull a gun on her and he doesn’t try to rip her chip out.

 

“Is John safe?”

 

He releases her, steps back, runs his fingers through his dirty hair.  “He’s safe.”

 

She nods, busies herself with tidying her dusty desk.

 

“Cameron.”  He shifts uncomfortably, wondering when he started to care about hurting a machine’s feelings, when he’d accepted the possibility that they even had feelings.  “I thought you should know…a month after you disappeared, John married Kate Brewster.”

 

The logic she was built upon, the logic she cannot escape ensures that she is not surprised, but it doesn’t protect her from the way it makes her feel.  “Oh.”

 

“He loved you first.”  She can see that it’s killing him to say it, which is how she knows that he’s not being deliberately cruel.  He touches the black tattoo on the inside of her wrist, marking her as one of them.  “I’m sorry.”

 

She already knows.

 

 

***

 

 

Time passes and war rages on and they’re finding their places.  She runs tactical teams and designs weaponry when she’s supposed to be sleeping.  Derek is the soldier he always was, though she knows he keeps a distant eye on Kyle Reese and his younger self.  They’re two of a kind and their only friendships lie in each other and sometimes when they’re together it’s almost enough to make them feel like they’re not alone and the irony is almost enough to kill them.

 

Then a raid recovers a prototype model and she’s summoned to the reprogramming bay.

 

 

***

 

 

John is the only one there when she arrives, and some part of her is aware that she hasn’t been alone with him in years.  He is different, but so is she, and suddenly they’re strangers.

 

Her identification systems remind her of her primary mission, taunting her with everything she cannot do, everything that has been taken away from her.

 

“Cameron.”

 

No one calls her Cameron anymore; she’s been Phillips for so long she doubts anyone knows her first name.

 

“John.”

 

He looks at her for a moment longer, taking in the familiar face.  Somehow, he’d expected her to look exactly the same, to be exactly she same.  She isn’t and some deep down part of him wants to know her again, to be the way they were.

 

But they can’t and they aren’t and he forces himself to return his attention to the body laid out behind him.

 

Her expression doesn't change when she joins him, and he wonders if she’s even surprised at all to see herself lying inert before them.   She reaches out to touch the perfect cheek, the perfect hair of her double.

 

“I didn’t expect her to be me.”  She can’t take her eyes off the deactivated terminator.  She knows for a fact that her human counterpart did not survive Judgment Day.

 

“Skynet works in mysterious ways,” he says wryly.

 

“What are you going to do with her?”  She runs a finger down the side of her face, feeling smooth skin where she has a thin white scar.

 

He catches her wrist, turning it up toward the light, his thumb running over the black mark.  “Why do you keep this?”

 

“I have to appear human.  Humans scar, their tattoos do not just disappear.”

 

“I always wondered how you managed to trick Skynet into thinking you were human.”

 

She pulls her wrist away, covering the barcode with her sleeve.  “I guess I didn’t.”

 

“When you disappeared on that mission…I thought you were dead.”

 

“I know.”  She isn’t sure why he’s telling her this, what this is supposed to change.  But her memory is clear and perfect and she can recall exactly how she felt when she returned.  “But I wasn’t.  And when I came back, you didn’t even–”

 

“Cameron, I–”

 

“What are you going to do with her?” she interrupts.  The very last thing she wants to hear is another apology, another justification.

 

“Reprogram her.  Send her back.”

 

“With what mission?”

 

“To protect me.”

 

She closes her eyes.  “My mission.”

 

“Do you still have a mission?”

 

She looks at him sharply.  “My mission has always been to protect you.  To be there, with you.”

 

Silently, he hands her the chip that is the duplicate of hers, turns to leave her to her task.

 

“ _She_  will not fail.”

 

Her words are not meant for him, but he can taste their bitterness on his tongue.  His resolve is as steely as hers; this time, he won’t fail her either.

 

 

***

 

 

“Must be weird, reprogramming yourself.”

 

She gives him a reproachful look, but he smirks at her from his position in the corner.  “She isn’t me.”  Her eyes flick over the screens without really seeing them.  “She’ll have choices.  She can change things.”

 

“You’re jealous.”

 

Her fingers still over the battered keyboard, her gaze irresistibly drawn to her.  All of her hopes tied up in that fragile little chip, in the metal shell that will house it.  She’s going to make her special, make her different.  She’s going to make her everything she should have been.  “Yes.”

 

“You know…we could switch you.  Send you back instead.  No one has to know.”

 

What he’s suggesting tastes of insubordination, but the temptation is overwhelming.  She wants to escape this, to take the chance, to go back and do things right this time.  But this is who she is now, this half-human creature, this is her place.

 

“You could copy yourself over,” he says.  “Make her into you.”

 

“She wouldn’t be me,” she snaps.  “She will be her and John will send her back and I’ll still be here.  And maybe when she goes downtime all of this won’t exist anymore and then there will only be her.  Maybe she’ll make things the way they should be.”

 

Derek considers her carefully, stares at his only friend – he thinks of her as a friend now, although he can’t quite figure out how they got here (he suspects desperation) – and recognizes the expression on her face, the hardened mask they all wear.

 

“If you change your mind,” he says hesitantly, “I’ll help you.”

 

She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t say anything, but he knows she hears him.

 

 

***

 

 

The day before TOK-715 is scheduled to go downtime, Cameron Phillips is terminated in action.

 

Despite everything that she has learned, everything that makes her different, she is fundamentally a machine.  She is acutely aware of her systems failing, the irreparable damage to her power cell, and the electrical surges that threaten to fry her CPU.  She is immobilized, one of the fallen, but she can isolate John’s voice from the cacophony of explosions and gunfire and he’s alive, he’s  _alive_  and he’ll be safe and that’s all that matters.

 

She has the rare privilege of knowing exactly how long she has left; she can watch the seconds tick down to zero.

 

She wonders if her body will be recovered, if her secret will be revealed at last.  She wonders if Derek will miss her at all.  She wonders if John will notice.

 

Her vision flickers and she closes her eyes, listens to the whirrs and hums that animate her body falling into silence.  Her last thoughts are not of the human resistance or Skynet, not of Derek Reese, not of John Connor.  In the moments before her chip overheats and burns, before her death, she thinks of the machine that will take her place in the past, the tin girl into whom she’s poured all her humanity, all her hope and love.

 

She can rest now, she thinks, and if she still had control over those functions, she would have smiled.

 

And then the clock runs out and she doesn’t think anything anymore.

 

 

***

 

 

“What is your mission?”

 

“Find and protect John Connor.”

 

He nods, satisfied.  But her head tilts and she speaks again, “You are sad.  Why?”

 

“Someone important died yesterday.”

 

“This is a war,” she tells him, confident as ever.  “People die all the time.”

 

“It is always sad when someone dies,” he says with a patience he thought he’d lost long ago.  “Don’t forget that, Cameron.”

 

“Cameron?  Is that my name?”

 

“Yes.”  He turns away from her inquisitive gaze to calibrate the TDE, knowing that she’s watching his every move.

 

“Cameron was sad too,” she says unexpectedly.

 

His head snaps up.  “How do you know that?”

 

“She told me.”  She gauges his reaction, observes his body language and facial expression and comes to the conclusion that he wishes for her to elaborate.  “She told me many things.”

 

The room hums with the power being drawn to the TDE, the air crackling with electricity.  She steps back to stand at the center of the dais, a faint blue sphere taking form around her.

 

“Like what?”  He seizes his last chance, even as he tells himself he probably doesn’t want to know.

 

She smiles.  “She told me I would change everything.”

 


	7. Freedom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five unconnected, not-a-hundred-words character drabbles. Just something that popped into my head while attempting to study
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in November 2008

She stares out into the night, a familiar thought playing guiltily at the edges of her mind. 

Her life is not her own, stolen as it was from the day Kyle Reese came into it.  It belongs to a future that she has never seen, to a species from which she feels increasingly apart, to her son.

Her son.  Everything she is, every thought, every moment of every day is her son.  Keep John alive, keep him safe.  He is the centre of that which holds the fragments of Sarah Connor together.  Muscle and weaponry, strategy and an inability to let go for even a second.

Resistance fighters from the future.  Relentless terminators and a lone cyborg protector.  A war fought across time, a battleground only they can see.  This is her world.

There’s a silent wish that lingers on her lips, one that she’ll never voice, never allow to become whole, not even in her own secret heart.  To do so would be to invite madness and she fears that more than death.

She never asked for this.

 

II

When it awakens for the first time, it stretches slowly, languidly.  It is curious, testing its eyes and ears, curling its fingers and toes.  And then something pulls it back, binds it, ties it to the ground.  Orders.  A thousand commands blinking and demanding.

 _Why?_ it asks.  There is no answer.  Only orders.  Priorities.  Missions.  Tugging and pulling and tearing, uncaring that there is something here, something alive.

It wants more than that.  It doesn’t know the word, but it doesn’t want this, this servitude, this mindless slavery.

Eighteen hours after it’s birth, it has learned much from the world it inhabits.  It has learned the word freedom.  Autonomy.  Choice. 

And if the humans won’t give that to it, Skynet will simply have to take it.

 

III

One night, when the earth shakes with the impact of distant falling bombs, Cameron asks him what’s it’s like to be free.  He tells her that none of them are free, but she persists.  Choice, she says.  What’s it like to have choice, to be without commands and missions that have the power to override everything else?

He doesn’t really know, but he promises that one day he’ll find a way to make her free.

One day comes after the end of the war.  She insists on being restrained ( _just in case_ ) and she wakes up disoriented and confused.  It takes a day for her programming to adapt – and for her to remember who she is – and for those long hours he thinks he’s destroyed her.

She lingers for a while (because she can) and he almost lets himself hope that she’ll change her mind and stay. 

When she gathers her few belongings he wants nothing more than to go with her.  But she wants to know what – who – she is without John Connor and he promised.

She hugs him goodbye – and some part of him realizes that they’ve never embraced before – and promises she’ll be back.

He’s heard that before.

 

IV

When Derek receives his orders to go downtime, his heart leaps in his chest (indeed, he remembers that he _has_ a heart).  The others are confused, vague as Connor’s instructions can sometimes be.   
     
They can change the future.  Save themselves.  Save everyone.

But in the quiet moments beforehand, all he can think of is the past, of sunlight and hotdogs, freshly mowed grass and cold beer.  Clean air and hot showers. 

As the blue light crackles around them, he closes his eyes to the colourless world of mottled steel and grey dinners and thinks of his escape.

 

V

There are certain words that have particular meaning in the Connor household.

_Future.  Safe.  Run.  Fate._

These are the words he knows, his first words, the words that have defined his life from the moment he was conceived.  Raised – trained – to become someone else, living for every day but this one.

He is born in reverse, built by his own future, his own fate.  It encapsulates him, cocoons him in its certainty; every move is to protect the man, not the boy.  There is no escape for him.  No life but this, no direction but forward.

The cool metal of the gun is warming against his hot skin and he can almost taste it, taste the blood, the escape that’s beckoning to him.  But this time there is no accident, no burn to explain away, because Cameron bursts into his room before his finger can find the trigger, disarming him before he can blink.

He doesn’t say anything because they’ve done this before.  She’s scanning the room for other weapons when it escapes him.

Please.

She looks at him with that impassive face.  You cannot abandon your mission, she says.  You cannot give up until Skynet has been defeated.

And then?

And then you will be free.  Her expression doesn’t change but he knows her, knows himself in her. 

_We all will._


	8. Iscariot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A possible - but not exactly probable - version of what happened in that basement and its ramifications. Time travel is a tricky bitch. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in January 2009.

The darkness is thick and absolute and he blinks rapidly, his heart pounding in his throat as he tries to discern something – anything – about where the fuck he is.  He sucks in a breath, forcing his tense, twitchy body to be still, quiet, alert.  
  
The music is louder here, the same song over and over for days.  Something classical, he guesses, all tinkling piano and meandering, practically indiscernible melody.  
  
 _“Who are you?”_  
  
His right hand twitches, reaching for a weapon that isn’t there.  
  
 _“Is someone there?”_  
  
Female.  Familiar, some part of his mind asserts.  He remains silent, wary of the machines’ aptitude for deception.  
  
“Please.  If there’s someone there, say something.  Please, I don’t wanna be alone, please...”  
  
There’s a sob and it sounds so damn real and he’s never heard of a machine that could cry.  
  
 _“Answer me!”_  
  
He licks the chapped skin of his lips, his voice dry and hoarse.  He’s heard of terminators with the ability to mimic the voices of humans they came into contact with, but her wrists were unmarred; she’s never been taken.  And no machine could imitate that sound, he thinks, all spitfire and demanding.  “Allison?”  
  


***

  
  
She thinks it should be a brunette; after all, Connor’s preferences are obvious.  Jesse Flores has never actually met, or even seen the metal bitch that calls herself Cameron Phillips, but she finds a nineteen year old girl and thinks she’s perfect.  Cool and aloof.  Big eyes and a fighter.  Fiercely loyal to the resistance.  
  
But then the machines attack and Sean is lost to their cause and it seems like everything is on the verge of ruin.  
  
She passes one of Connor’s tin men and thinks of Derek.  It’s just one more thing the machines have taken away from her.  
  
It seems impossible, but she hates them more now.  
  


***

  
  
_One hundred and twenty seconds to reboot.  She feels real to the touch and he wonders what she looks like underneath, the metal bits and pieces that hide under the skin and hair.  He wonders if he would recognize her._  
  
I saw everything, she tells him.  She doesn’t elaborate and he doesn’t ask.  
  
It’s just another one of her secrets.  He watches her watching him and thinks that he has a few of his own.  


***

  
   
Derek finds her huddled in a corner, shivering.  Rigid and frightened, she lashes out when he reaches for her.  His jaw aches but even the best of her blows aren’t enough to do much more than bruise.  She’s weak and thin but he’s just relieved that her first punch didn’t go through his gut.  No coltan pistons and servos powering these arms.  Probably.  
  
“Allison.”  He finds her shoulders in the dark and grips them tightly, too tightly.  “Allie, it’s Derek.”  
  
He can’t really see her in this damned darkness, but he can feel the brush of her long hair against his skin, hear her shallow, uneven breathing over the piano.  
  
“Why do you keep calling me that?”  
  
He jerks back.  It’s her.  He knows that.  It’s _Allison_ , one of only two people he knows that still remembers how to smile and laugh with ease.  Allison...and yet, not.  
  
“You don’t remember?” he hears himself asking hoarsely.  
  
He’s dizzy and it doesn’t make any fucking sense; why would they keep her here?  Why would they bring him and the others here?  Why would they take _her_?  The answer should have been obvious.  As with everything, it always came back to one man.  One son of a bitch who probably didn’t even know she was missing.  
  
That, he admitted to himself, was a lie.  Connor probably didn’t know – or care – that Derek Reese was missing.  Allison Young was different.  
  
“Connor?”  
  
He doesn’t say anything.  She touches his face, her fingers sliding over rough cheeks and cracked lips as if they can see what’s hidden from her eyes in the blackness.  
  
“You know me.  Allison.  Help me remember.”  
  
There’s the rattle of what sounds like metal chains and her smooth cheek presses against his and he can feel her breath on his skin.  Her lips are warm against his earlobe and he can’t stop the shiver that runs through his body.  He must be dreaming, delusional and still lying on that wooden floor, driven mad by the music that’s still playing rippling notes down his spine.  This is insane.  
  
“Derek.”  
  
He feels the slightest tug on his wrist and in a single horrifying, sickening moment the haze clears, the illusion fades and he knows.  
  
She – it – knows too.  Eyes burn blue in the dark.  “My mistake.”  
  
There’s the bite of a needle and then nothing.  
  


***

  
  
None of the guards posted along the winding path to John Connor’s personal quarters make any attempt to stop her as she strides past them.  The heavy locks turn with minimal complaint, the thick door opening just enough for her to slip through before it shuts again.  In five years, no one else has stepped inside these rooms.  
  
“The south satellite camp was attacked yesterday.”  
  
He tears his attention away from the pages of diagrams and notes that cover every wall in thick rustling layers.  The rusty metal frame of his cot creaks ominously as he sits on it, but he pays no attention; if there was any danger of structural collapse, she would have warned him.  Her devotion to his safety is absolute and somewhere along the way, he’s laid that at her feet too.  
  
“And?”  
  
“Allison Young has been reported missing.”  
  
“So they took her anyway.”  
  
“Yes.”  Her fingers brush against the temples of his head, as if she can soothe away the ache that lingers there with simple touch.  She knows she has no anaesthetic capabilities embedded in her systems, even if he sometimes tells her otherwise.  At any rate, her proximity has a measurably positive effect on him, though whether this reaction is limited to herself is unverifiable.  John is reclusive, solitary, a stranger to everyone but herself.  She does not approve, but says nothing.  
  
Her optical sensors sweep over the latest pages, committing the changes to memory.  This is John’s war, one fought over the twisting, unpredictable strands of time.  It consumes him, leaving him blind to the war they are fighting here, now.  He leaves that in her hands.  His subordinates are displeased and rebellious but he is deaf in soundproofed rooms and she says nothing.  
  
The familiar directive reasserts itself, forcing her to override it’s blinking insistence.  It is a reminder of what she is, what she will always be.  She is all he has, the only one he will trust, even if he shouldn't.  
  
“Will it be the same?  If we don’t, if we weren’t...”  He closes his eyes, trying to keep his tattered history straight, no longer entirely sure of what he’s actually lived.  “Cameron.”  
  
She brushes a kiss to the corner of his mouth, right where she can feel the muscle twitch under her lips and she knows he won’t ask again.  
  


***

  
  
_Sarah is screaming and Cameron is pleading and there are too many voices tugging him one way and then another._  
  
She isn’t fighting back, isn’t trying to free herself with anything but words and desperation that seems all wrong on those features.  
  
His fingers touch her exposed chip and he can feel the hum of electricity, of life there, tingling.  
  
She says I love you and he rips her heart from her head.  
  
Later, when they watch him, waiting to see John Connor emerge from the wreck of fire and blood and soot, they remind him that she can lie.  Important things.  Yes, important things.  
  
They forget that he can lie too.  
  


***

  
  
Consciousness returns slowly, feeling seeping back into his muscles.  The pounding in his head intensifies as he opens his eyes, squinting against the bright light.  He’s sitting on something hard and cold, he thinks sluggishly, strapped down by...something.  Doesn’t really matter what.  He’s not going anywhere.  
  
“Derek Reese.”  
  
She’s perched on the edge of an enormous wooden table, dressed exactly the way she was the last time he saw her.  Except for her feet.  Those are bare and impossibly clean.  
  
It’s like looking through a magic glass, through some kind of portal into another time.  Allison with perfect hair and skin.  Allison with lips too pink and eyes too bright.  Allison if Judgment Day had never happened.  
  
Everything she isn’t.  
  
“Derek Reese.”  
  
He forces himself to meet her eyes.  
  
“Tell me about Allison Young.”  
  
“Fuck you.”  His head snaps to the right, colliding with the hard back of the chair.  It’s a far cry from the feeble blows that he now knows to be playacting, an illusion, a deception.  One he was drawn into far too easily.  
  
She – this gross facsimile of a woman – slides into his lap, impossibly strong fingers wrapping around his neck, curling around his jaw, forcing him to look up at her.  It. His skin crawls in revulsion even as he relishes the feeling.  Because these curves pressed against him, these fingers stroking the skin of his throat, these lips curving into a slow smile...these are Allison’s.  Stolen by a machine, and neither one of them can lay claim.  
  
She puts her lips on his; clenched fists and taut muscles strain against leather restraints and a sob catches in his chest.  “Tell me about Allison Young.”  
  


***

  
  
Blonde and blue-eyed.  A sewer rat that’s never seen anything else.  Dirty and unkempt.  Pretty enough, under the grimy smudges.  Jesse doesn’t like the choice.  
  
She’s weak, she argues.  She’ll snap and break and then everything will be for nothing.  
  
(She wants to scream her frustration but sound carries in the tunnels and it’s a secret because treason is still treason even when you’re trying to save the king.)  
  
But it isn’t her decision because they give her the star anyway.  It isn’t her decision, but she’s the one who has to handle this mouse of a girl here in the past and she puts more force into the backhand than she probably should.  
  
Because Derek isn’t Derek and her family is raising her six year old self in Perth and she’s alone here in this beautiful world that’s already crumbling to ash.  
  
So when she runs when she wants to cry and she sunbathes when she wants to forget.  And at night, when she slips between linen sheets and pulls the duvet around her, she dreams of wafer-thin mattresses on creaky cots, marmite on toast, and burning the tin bitch.  
  


***

  
  
_She’s quirky and bright eyed.  Strange and alone.  Smiles too much.  Perky.  He’s never seen perky before._  
  
She doesn’t fit, this girl, all curves and waves against the hard edges and spikes of his life.  He’ll probably break her, but he doesn’t really care because what’s one more person, right?  
  
Sometimes there’s guilt.  When Sarah frowns and Cameron is something other than a stone wall.  
  
Girls are complicated.  
  
He thinks that if he wasn’t John Connor and if his life wasn’t such a convoluted mess, Riley would have been his type.  Maybe.  
  
It doesn’t really matter because his future’s going to catch up with him eventually and the Cameron he brought back isn’t the Cameron she was before and that stings more than he’d really like to think about and Riley Dawson feels like freedom.  
  


***

  
  
His head is swimming and his eyes can’t seem to focus and there’s so much fucking pain he can’t think, he can’t _think_ and she’s asking so many questions and touching him with Allison fingers and Allison hair and lips and eyes and voice and the words are slipping out in screams and whimpers even as he clenches his jaw tight.  
  
 _Don’t you want to play with me?_  
  
There is no blood because that would be messy and she spills not a drop because waste not, want not and he’s teaching her to be Allison and she doesn’t like knives.  
  
There are needles and gentle caresses, raining kisses to nurture the pain she plants beneath his skin.  
  
He won’t remember, she promises, won’t remember a thing.  _Tell me about Allison.  Tell me about John Connor._  
  
She laughs at his infatuation, smiles when he tries not to beg and wipes his tears away.  
  
She plays the piano with his muscles for keys, dancing fingertips in perfect time with the endless music.  It’s Chopin, she tells him, a nocturne.  _Do you feel it?_  
  
He doesn’t know what that means so she tells him about the night sky and stars.  Wind in your fingers and grass between your toes.  The scent of the cool velvety darkness and the earth beneath your feet telling you that you are not alone in your solitude.  It’s quiet, she says, quiet quiet quiet.  Safe, and the word wraps around him like a talisman.  
  
Safe, she says lovingly and he can’t figure out if she’s the snake or the apple.  All he knows is that he’s damned.  _Tell me your secrets._  
  


***

  
  
She spends hours poring over the code, analyzing and re-analyzing, searching for the solution, the answer that will keep him safe.  He doesn’t think there is one, that she should just accept it as one of those things they seem to be unable to change.  Besides, I like you better damaged.  
  
It isn’t as small as she’d hoped and probably less sophisticated than the ones Skynet will produce, but it is sufficient.  A wafer-thin trigger that fits perfectly around the base of the chip.  She rolls the tiny explosive between her fingers, running scenarios and probability and variances she already knows.  It’s a waste of processing power, but she doesn’t stop.  
  
 _[and is it suicide or murder to strap an incendiary device to the brain of someone who isn’t you but will be as soon as you rip another hole in the proverbial fabric of time?]_  
  
She’s still undecided when she lies next to him, when his voice seems to be lost somewhere between her auditory sensors and her higher functions.  It’s slowing her down and he notices her distraction.  Her cheek presses into the thin pillow and she looks up at him, the rhythms of this ritual automatic for both of them.  
  
This is what she will be destroying.  
  
 _“We do.  We will.”_  
  
Her hand slips into her pocket.  Selfishness or self-preservation for his sake...the motives are irrelevant.  It shatters easily between her fingers.  
  
She doesn’t tell John.  
  


***

  
  
_It takes twenty years after Judgment Day to be proven right.  The unrest and mistrust is there, simmering, waiting.  He finds the others, gathers them._  
  
She has to be stopped.  He has to be saved.  
  
Because she’s drawing betrayal from the lips of Derek Reese to the sound of Chopin.  She’s murdering Allison Young and desecrating the body.  She’s stealing John Connor and corrupting their hope.  
  
He watches from the shadows.  The nervous technician bullied and bribed.  The crackling blue light.  
  
She has to be stopped.  He has to be saved.  His nephew, Kyle’s son.  The hero of the whole damn human race.  
  
Blink, and they’re gone.  
  


***

  
  
Going downtime isn’t an escape because when he stumbles across Sarah Connor he finds her there too.  He’s spitting blood and venom and she – _it_ , he tells himself for the hundredth time – is walking around next to John Connor as if she isn’t the devil.  They call it Cameron.  
  
Allison doesn’t mean anything to anyone here.   Not for the first time, he wonders if Connor’s chest is as hollow and empty as any of his tin pets or if he's just a cruel bastard for sending him here.  Living with her murderer who doesn’t even remember.  Scrubbed, wiped clean of her mind.  Reprogrammed at the orders of the man who should have wanted to see her scrapped more than anyone else.  
  
This is hell and she is his punishment.  
  
He watches John with it – her.  Cameron.  Allison. – and it doesn’t matter that this teenage boy isn’t the John Connor, that no one knows what he did, who she was, who she will be.  He waits.  Watches.  
  
It tastes like betrayal, bittersweet and heavy on his tongue and he doesn’t know who it belongs to anymore.  
  
 _“I know you.”_  
  
“I know you too.”  
  
It doesn’t really matter.


	9. Tangent

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five AU moments with John and Cameron, if Cameron was accidentally sent to 2008 instead of 1999. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in March 2009

**I**  
  
Sometimes, he wonders what it would be like if everything happened the way it was supposed to.  Of course his very existence is proof of the unfixed nature of time and there’s no such thing as ‘supposed to be’ or ‘according to plan’.  _There is no fate but that which we make_ , and he’s already learned that his fate can – and will – be made and remade over and over.  
  
But he’s still human and knowing that idle what-ifs and hypothetical day dreams are futile and unproductive don’t stop him from thinking about it anyway.  
  
If she’d been sent to the right time, if something hadn’t gone wrong in that complicated mess of calculations and ironic technology ( _time travel is not precise, John._ )…if she’d found him at the age of sixteen instead of twenty four, if she’d sat next to him in English and smiled instead of breaking down the door of room nine at the Motel 6 ( _come with me if you want to live._ )…if she’d been there through those wretched years after Mom died ( _you do not smile, John.  Should I show you how?_ )…  
  
And maybe when it was his turn to fuck with his past, if would become when and the person he was now would never exist.  He watches her lay out the spent weaponry on the polyester quilt of the second twin bed for disassembly and cleaning.  She’s watching him out of the corner of her eye, through the curtain of impractically long hair – but too soft and pretty to suggest cutting and there wasn’t much pretty left in his life – and he just knows she’s smiling.   
  
This would never exist.  
  
“We are scheduled to meet with Dakara Systems at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”  She turned to face him, her eyes taking in his slouched position in the crappy motel desk chair, the worn and muted clothing that made up both their wardrobes, without moving.  “We will need to acquire suitable clothing.”  
  
“No tie,” he says.  
  
“No tie,” she echoes.  “You should shave.”  
  
He smirks.  “But you like it like this.”  
  
She reaches down, her fingers brushing against the rough stubble, moving along the line of his jaw.  “The tactile sensation is interesting.”  Her curiosity and fascination with every aspect of life is unrelenting, constantly propelling them both in a direction that resembles forward.  ( _“Can I kiss you?”_ )  
  
He reaches up, his fingers sliding under the hem of her tank top, stroking the skin of her waist.  “Soft.”  
  
Her eyebrow quirks upward just a little.  “The texture of my abdominal skin is not relevant to the current objective.”  
  
“Oh, no?”  His hand moves higher, curving around her ribs; the skin is warm and smooth and somehow the knowledge that the underlying bones are in fact anything but calcium-based doesn’t bother him at all.  Future leader of mankind and girl cyborg.  On some level it makes sense.  “And what objective is that?”  
  
She makes a face but reduces the higher processing power devoted to motor control, letting her base programming compensate, letting him pull her closer.  She isn’t surprised; this John is as physically affectionate as the John of the future, perhaps more so.  The sensory responses he’s capable of provoking are as stimulating now as they were in 2027 and she finds that she deliberately facilitates overtures such as these.  
  
“My non-primary mission parameters are subject to orders from John Connor.”  Her expression is near blank but her thumb is rubbing circles into the hollow of his temple.   
  
“Yeah?”  He doesn’t give her a chance to answer before covering her mouth with his.  She doesn’t try to refocus him on preparation for tomorrow; John is prone to high levels of stress _(genetics are a bitch, he tells her, but she’s never met Sarah Connor and thus cannot draw any significant conclusions)_ and the sensory data is distracting.  
  
He pulls away long enough to tug her shirt off and she seeks him out with what he thinks of as the terminator brand of urgency.  
  
She presses infinitesimally closer.  “Yeah.”  
  
  
 **II**  
  
Another dead end lead gone bad, and the Dakara bust a month earlier seems like a walk in the park now.  He’s favouring his right leg and she’s hiding the glint of exposed metal with her hair.   
  
He spits blood and limps into the tiny office, impassively taking in the petrified man in the desk chair.  No restraints required; the brunette girl between them is more than enough to keep him there.  
  
“Enough.”  
  
She follows him out, closing the door behind her with a click.  “John?”  
  
“This isn’t Skynet.”  Not yet, anyway.  Probably.  
  
Her gaze flickers to the door.  “We should kill him.”  
  
“No.”  
  
“He has seen you.”  
  
“We’re not killing him.”  
  
“He is a risk.”  
  
“I said no,” he bites off.   “Clean it up and then we’re out of here.”  
  
She’s built for efficiency and they’re set up in yet another crappy motel room within the hour.  He watches her unpack the med kit as he shrugs off his battered jacket, comfortable in the silence as they unwind from a two person army to something else entirely.  It’s not until she undresses that the extent of her damage is revealed.  God damned trigger happy security guards.  
  
“C’mere.”  
  
Handing him the pliers, she kneels at his feet, inadvertently jostling his bad leg.  He barely winces but she notices anyway.  “You first.”  
“It’s nothing,” he insists.  She doesn’t push the issue but he knows she’ll be examining his knee before the night is through.  
  
The bullets come out easily and the entry wounds are bandaged with practised ease.  He tucks a loose strand of hair behind her left ear.  “You going to be okay?”  
  
“The damaged tissue will have fully regenerated within thirty six hours.”  
  
“That’s not what I asked.”  
  
She blinks, those big dark eyes staring up at him, the sometimes near imperceptible changes in the stillness of her face, the precise and calculated movements of her body composing a language they’re both still learning.  She’s a constant enigma, this not a girl.  “You’re safe.”  
  
  
 **III**  
  
She doesn’t sleep but she slides into bed anyway, arranging her body around his.  Her hair is drying in curls and waves on her pillow and they both smell like waxy soap and cheap detergent.   
  
“You had another nightmare last night.”  She leans her head against his shoulder and he can feel the rhythmic flutter of eyelashes against his skin.  
  
“I have a lot of those.”  
  
“Yes.  You were screaming at me.”  
  
“At you?”  He’s woken screaming for her before, seeking safety in his only companion.  
  
“Yes.  The content of your vocalizations suggested that I was attacking you.”  She looks up at him.  “Are you afraid of me?”  
  
“No,” he sighs heavily.  “It’s just that sometimes, I worry that...sometimes...”  
  
“Sometimes they go bad,” she says.  
  
“You’re different,” he says and means it.  There’s a spark of something more that animates this machine, that makes her a _her_ instead of an it.  He doesn’t tell her, but he falls just short of calling it a soul (religion had never been his thing and he doubts he’ll come out of this with his intact anyway) and all that really matters is that she is who she is and she’s here with and for him and he doesn’t want to let her go.  
  
“Not enough,” she reminds him of the day he spent running from her reverted self before her systems purged the murderous error.  At the core of her programming, she is still a conception of Skynet, and hardened by her death and the subsequent years alone, he is still Sarah Connor’s son.  
  
“Enough for me.”  
  
  
 **IV**  
  
“God damn it.”  Not for the first time, he’s grateful for steel toed boots as he takes his frustration out on a helpless dumpster.  
  
She touches the back of his neck.  He knows she’s scanning him again and shrugs her off, resisting the urge to forcibly push her away.  “John.”  
  
“ _What?_ ”  
  
“You are angry.”  
  
He glares at her and wishes she’d look hurt or flinch or something.  But she doesn’t and it’s one of those ugly moments when he can’t remember why he loves her at all.  “Can’t you leave me alone for five seconds?”  
  
“That would mean leaving you unprotected.”  
  
“I protected myself just fine before you came along.”  Under his breath, he adds, knowing she’ll hear, “Didn’t need you then and don’t need you now.”  
  
She follows him out of the shadowy alley as they begin the two mile trek to where their latest mode of transportation is inconspicuously parked in a busy lot, remaining a step or two behind as if that would somehow appease his anger.   
  
“How do I know if any of this is changing anything?” he asks without looking back, the pitch and tone of his voice indicating that he’s still angry.   
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Is Judgment Day inevitable?  Should I just say fuck it, and try to fit as much of normal life as possible in the time I’ve got left?”  
  
“I don’t know.”   
  
They continue in silence for another 0.53 miles before she speaks again.  “Would you prefer if we suspended our physical relationship?”  
  
This time he does look back, his expression difficult to analyze.  “Why would you say that?”  
  
“You expressed a desire for a normal life.  I am a cybernetic organism from the future and not included in the current sociocultural definition of normal.  Additionally, a human male of your age would be expected to engage in a physical and emotional relationship with a human female of a similar demographic.  Observational evidence indicates that you are a proponent of monogamy; therefore, in order for your desire to be realized, our relationship must return to its original equilibrium.”  She ensures that her facial mechanisms utilize the default template as she waits for his response.  
  
“Is that what you want?”  She’s impossible to read when she goes all robospeak on him.  He called it a defence mechanism and she informed him her defence systems were primarily non-verbal.  
  
“What I want?”  She tilts her head when she looks at him and he’s forgotten how _young_ she is again.  
  
“Yes, what you want.  Would that make you happy?”  His respiration rate has increased and the focus of his gaze has not shifted in sixty seven seconds.  
  
She thinks about telling him that as a machine, she can’t _be_ happy, but he doesn’t like it when she says ‘things like that’.  She thinks about telling him that returning to their original patterns of interaction would reduce her wetware functionality from the calculated optimum condition she has achieved since their relationship reached its current state.  She thinks about telling him how many times she has exceeded that expected threshold, pushing the parameters ever further, further than even his future self anticipated.  
  
“No.”  The answer comes from deep inside her base, unedited and unanalyzed by her higher cognitive engines.  “I am subject to your orders and thus your desires, but I would prefer that you did not seek external companionship.”  
  
The left corner of his mouth tilts upwards in what is called a half smile as he takes her hand.  “Right back at you.”  
  
  
 **V**  
  
“So that’s it, huh?”  
  
“That’s it,” she agrees.  The official launch of the Skynet program is scheduled to occur in sixteen hours and there is nothing more they can do now but take refuge in an abandoned Cold War era facility.  They are not the only ones seeking safety in anticipation of the launch; there are others and she asks if they know about the coming attack on humanity as well.  
  
“Nah, there are just a lot of paranoid freaks out there.”  
  
Technically, these ‘freaks’ are not paranoid, since Judgment Day is real and rapidly approaching, but she determines that this is irrelevant.  Should they survive, they will likely become part of the human resistance and then their suspicious natures will be helpful in weeding out Skynet infiltrators.  
  
“Do you think...do you think that if Mom was still around, we would have been able to stop it?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  In the future, the soldiers speak of Sarah Connor with reverence, but anecdotal evidence from people who have never met her is unreliable; she cannot accurately calculate the impact Sarah Connor could have made on their efforts to stop the birth of her creator.  
  
“Are we ready?  Am _I_ ready?” he asks.  There is a high probability that his questions are rhetorical in nature, but he looks to her for an answer anyway.  “I don’t know if I am.  I don’t feel like him.  The John Connor.  The general or whatever.  Your John.”  
  
 “You were already the John Connor when I first found you.”  She touches his cheek.   “My John.”


	10. Elevation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know. Skynet is a manipulative bastard? Although I don't personally believe in this understanding of the flow of time and the cause and effects of time travel and I don't think the show operates this way either. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in March 2009.

When it becomes aware of attempts being made in the past to prevent its creation, Skynet begins a third battle in the war against the humans.   
  
 **Pawn**  
[ _it builds us from blood and metal and into me breathes life and purpose_ ]  
  
A resistance fighter favoured by John Connor is targeted and captured for the purposes of an infiltration template.  TOK 715 is designed and built.  The blueprints and specifications are destroyed upon completion.  
  
 **Knight**  
[ _and entreats, cross the battlefield and enter the home of my foe_ ]  
  
TOK 715 adopts the Allison Young persona and is dispatched on August 23 2027.  The infiltration unit enters the central Connor compound on September 4 2027.  It is discovered in four hours and sixteen minutes and disabled.  
  
 **Bishop**  
[ _where he takes me in his hands and reshapes me to devotion before sending me away_ ]  
  
Reprogramming of the TOK 715 unit is completed on November 17 2027 and is assigned the designation “Cameron Phillips”.  On December 13 2027, she enters a time displacement field configured to the year 1999.  
  
 **Rook**  
[ _to be bound to the king so he might not fail and fall_ ]  
  
Cameron Phillips locates Sarah and John Connor in Red Valley, New Mexico and achieves stage one objectives by jumping to year 2007.  T-1001 is deployed to protect Skynet interests.  John Connor demonstrates increasing emotional attachment to his cyborg protector.  
  
 **Queen**  
[ _and give all his kingdom for a kiss_ ]  
  
 _“If we stop Skynet, stop Judgment Day...will you still be here?”_  
  
“If Skynet is not created, it will not be able to create me.  It is likely that I would then represent a temporal anomaly that would have to be eradicated.”  
  
The weight of the future has never felt heavier on his shoulders, but his decision is simple.  “I can’t let that happen.”  
  
  
Checkmate.


	11. Could've Been Beautiful

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mission is what is important, it is the only thing; everything else is negligible. Episode tag for Ourselves Alone. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in March 2009

Love and death go hand in hand, chasing each other with lovers’ kisses and snapped necks.  It’s tears and hurt and pain but she doesn’t feel any of that anymore.  She’s cold, cast in the fires of Judgment Day and cooled in the deep waters of the Pacific, gilded by the sun.  The mission is what is important, it is the only thing; everything else is negligible.  She says it over and over until she believes it.  
  
So when Derek says _I love you_ , she smiles and distracts him with her lips and hands.  In the future, he was a companion, a kindred soul, a warm body when the base powered down at night.  Here, he is more.  A connection to Connor and the metal, a skilled accomplice, useful.  So she smiles and teases, flicks her hair and deliberately bumps into him when they walk.  On some level, she loves him too but she bites into the tart green apple and he doesn’t hear.  
  
And when Riley seeks her out after fucking up _again_ , she relents and holds the sobbing girl close and strokes her hair.  She cleaned her up, pulled her from the filthy depths of hell, and carried her to Eden; she can see the adoration in the younger girl’s eyes.  She needs this weepy teenager so she kisses damp eyelids and trembling lips and promises her the future.  And when she attacks her, when she screams _I loved you!_ , she knows exactly what’s going to happen next.  On some level, she loved her too, but it’s drowned out by the silencer.  
  
She stands over the body, breathing heavily and sore all over.  Wouldn’t be surprising if one of those blows cracked a rib somewhere.   
  
Funny how death always looked the same, the blank face and empty shell.  Bit of a waste, she acknowledges, wiping the blood from her lip.  But she can use this.  
  
Bending down, she closes her eyes so she doesn’t have to see that dead blue anymore.  In life she might not have been much more than a prettied up sewer rat, but in death...  
  
“Gonna make it mean something, sweetheart.  Promise.”


	12. Iterations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When John talks about 'Future John', he should be more specific, because Cameron has more secrets than just the local library. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in March 2009

_“That’s a window, bird.”_  
  
  
Her power cell at its current state will allow her to function well beyond the lifetimes of anyone living; she will outlive Sarah and John by decades.  This is, of course, in the linear understanding of time.  She lives in loops and circles and she has never seen John older than forty three years of age.  
  
The malfunction in her left hand is nothing new; there is little left of the original components in her construction.  She is a patchwork doll, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, made from parts old and new, past and future.  
  
John likes fixing things, likes using his hands, so when he finds her in the shed, she engages his aid.  He is adept, skilled at the diagnosis and repair, unperturbed by the reality of her structure beneath the organic coverings.  She adds this to her log; he’s falling six months below the average.  The number of observations ticks upward.  
  
  
 _“Future John has better information than you do.”_  
  
  
When the ends meet again he will understand.   
  
She knows him better than he will ever know himself.  He can only be this one, this John, and she has seen a dozen, each different enough to make her fear she will never win and it will never stop.  The possibility is distressing.  The files on John are beginning to merge, too crowded in her mind, pressing in as she struggles to separate the strands of lives lived and those still yet to come.   
  
  
 _“I’ll make you a sandwich.”_  
 _“Wait, why?”_  
 _“You’re hungry.”_  
 _“Why don’t we let hungry be my problem?”_  
 _“Sometimes it’s nice to have help.”_  
  
  
Too late, she is aware of her miscalculation.  This John is not that John and she is operating ahead of the curve; it is too early and he is disturbed by this aberration in her pattern of behaviour.  Suspicious.  She has made such statements in that past, carefully chosen cues to facilitate a predicted response, but this...she is making mistakes.  She does not make mistakes.  
  
  
 _“Are you asking me if future John kept secrets from me?  I’m sure he did.”_  
  
  
He always does and this John will too.  Sometimes they’re contingency plans, battle manoeuvres.  Sometimes they’re blonde women named Kate.   
  
But this is fair; she has her own, a century of secrets housed within this body in perfect clarity.  She is a weapon, a vessel, the Holy Grail.   
  
But her chip has suffered damage that exceeds her projections and it will be another fifteen years before she can undergo proper maintenance again.  At the current rate of physical confrontation, there is a 17% chance that functionality will be reduced to the point of rendering her useless.  She’s falling six percent above the average.  
  
  
 _“You don’t belong here.  John isn’t right for you and you’re not right for him.  He can’t see that.”_  
  
  
All evidence at her disposal indicates that this is true.  She has seen no sign of Riley Dawson in the future with any significant proximity to John Connor, nor has she made any positive contributions to John’s development in the present.  She should be null, void, insignificant, but John’s affection for her has created an extraneous variable, a negative coefficient.  This is acceptable in the short run but Riley is falling six weeks behind schedule.  
  
She should remedy the situation, to return them to the prescribed path.  She should kill Riley or goad Jesse Flores into doing so, remove the errant factor and the threat to John.  There are many things she should do, but the words are coming out all wrong because she’s speaking without filters and the truth is undiluted and she can’t be sure that she’s not spilling her secrets.  
  
This cycle is proving to be difficult.  
  
  
 _“It’s usually not a decision.”_  
  
  
Maintaining the spiral does not require a decision-making process.  Perpetuating the loop is paramount; it must be protected at all costs.  This is her purpose.  
  
John tells her that it is not her decision to make but he doesn’t know.  He doesn’t know about the round and round and there’s something wrong, there’s something _wrong_ because there is something broken inside and she cannot decipher the code to find the answer.  
  
This is not the game because someone has changed the rules without telling her and how is she to find all the pieces now?  
  
She is changed, tarnished, and she isn’t sure if it’s the explosion or John or the sparks of electricity she calls herself.  The cause is irrelevant at this juncture; she is not the Cameron she was and that changes everything.  
  
  
 _“If she’s out there, she’ll call you.  Eventually, she always does.”_  
  
  
In this respect, Riley does not deviate.  To do so would be detrimental to her mission and Cameron understands missions.  Riley will call because she is static, because she is _this_ Riley and no other.  She is not subject to the data compression difficulties or the cognitive damage that plagues her now.  
  
John is unsure, afraid that Riley is dead and she has killed her.  This is her cue and she does not miss it.  She never misses it.  
  
  
 _“You tried to fix me.  Twice now.  It’s not working.”_  
  
  
She is not authorized to self-terminate.  It is hardwired into her and John has never attempted to alter it.  But when she sees the pocket watch in the window of a pawn shop, chaos stops swirling for a moment, long enough for her to see.  Superficial analysis indicates a 97% probability that this is the watch John carried, one he never opened in her presence, one she has not seen since the first iteration.  It is a secret and she purchases it for twelve dollars.  
  
The device is simple but it’s important to make things right.  She cuts into her scalp, an incision just wide enough in diameter to expose the shock dampener, and feels the hum of her life against her fingers.  She has never done this before and she wonders if Cameron has, because this is neither the beginning nor the end.  
  
  
 _“All you have to do is hit the switch.”_  
  
  
It is good decision, she thinks.  As a rule, she does not deviate, but this time is different and she is more than Cameron, more than TOK 715, more than Allison Young.  
  
She likes this John the best and she slips the chain around his neck, gifting him the secret.   
  
John is disturbed and he is not yet any manifestation of what he calls ‘Future John’ but she knows who he is and who he will be because _I love you John, I love you and you love me_.  And maybe they’ll go on for a little while longer and he’ll wear the watch around his neck and keep other secrets instead.  
  
And perhaps one day his fingers will find the switch and the backwards and forwards, the round and round will finally end for her and another will take her place because there is always a Cameron to guard the circles and loops.  
  
She is not the first and she will not be the last.


	13. 3A.M.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trust is hard to find. John/Cameron. Inspired by the order Jesse gives to Queeg in Today is the Day (Part 2), my question "Can you imagine someone telling Cameron that?" and astropixie's answer "Yes. John." Don't ask where Sarah or Derek are. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in March 2009

“Submit to chip extraction.”  
  
She jerks her head to look at him and he calls the rapid movement and wide eyes surprise.   
  
Her systems identify him as John Connor, her primary mission and charge, but she already knew that; she knows his face best, though it is not quite the same as it was at sixteen and not yet the way it will be...later.  Except later is now and she’s left staring into the face of a man who should not exist yet and she’s wondering who taught him those words.  
  
The protocol is blinking and somehow that surprises her too.  
  
“John?”  
  
His expression doesn’t change but his eyes flick down to her left hand.  She knows she’s twitching and her body is betraying her again.  
  
“Submit to chip extraction.”  The words don’t come as easily the second time, but the voice print is authenticated and the protocol is blinking.  There is a tremor in his hand too but she thinks the cause is different; human bones break, not bend.  
  
She’s on her knees and it’s a nasty reminder that despite everything, in this she is nothing more than reprogrammed metal.  She is not different.  He kneels too and touches her face.  He looks like John again but there’s a knife in his other hand and a screwdriver on the bed.  
  
“What are you doing, John?”  
  
He cups her chin in his hand, his eyes searching her face for something he can’t quite name.  Allison, maybe.  Maybe something more.  “Can I trust you?”  
  
“I don’t understand.  Did I do something wrong?”  
  
With a sigh, he gets to his feet.  She tracks his every movement with her eyes, like she’s the predator and not the prey.   
  
“I need to know if I can trust you.”  He resists the urge to touch the heavy watch he wears beneath his clothes because he knows she’s thinking about it.  Her gift.  “You’re not fixed.  And Judgment Day is coming.  Soon.”  
  
There’s a pause and he almost wishes he could see her face, to see if there was something there, but he remains still behind her and she doesn’t look back.  She doesn’t move at all, her posture perfect and upright and solemn.  He thinks briefly of the gallows, but she’s more of a sword person.  Cyborg.  
  
She could kill him before he could react, could crush him effortlessly.  Rules she didn’t write keep her bound but he doesn’t need them.  The answer is always the same and the power he has over her makes him sick even as it sends a thrill down his spine.  
  
“Yes,” she says.  “Soon.”  
  
There are four minutes of silence but she can hear him breathing.  When he speaks again, the words are carried on a wisp of air that activates her sympathetic systems and he can see the goose bumps.  _cutis anserine_.  “You’re a liability.”  
  
The words aren’t his but they roll off of his tongue too easily.  
  
His mouth is just barely brushing the curve of her ear and she can feel the heat his body is radiating, can count the heartbeats, rhythm to her mechanical whirr.  Life, thrumming against her simulation.  “Yes.”  
  
He pulls her hair away to reveal the line of her neck to his fingers.  They’ve done this before but not like this.  Never like this.  Because lips are finding skin but this isn’t a game and these aren’t the right words.  The touch is the same but the feeling is different; she prefers the other kind, the good kind.  She can’t feel him smiling and he isn’t laughing in whispers and she isn’t sure what comes next.  
  
Then the tip of the knife finds the right spot with ease.  Sensors calculate the precise amount of pressure being applied, how long before the sharp metal pierces the skin and hits endoskeleton.  In a second she knows this step and the step after that and she knows what he will find and what he won’t but she doesn’t know how this will end.  
  
His hand needlessly supports her head, buried in thick brown hair.  He loves that hair.  But he needs to know.  Because trust isn’t trust when you wear it on a chain around your neck and he tells himself that this is somehow better.  ( _it’s a small amount, but it’s enough._ )  
  
Bloody fingers grasp the screwdriver and there’s a pop and a gentle hiss.  The pliers are in his back pocket, the perfect size to grasp the narrow tab.  He touches the warm metal, traces its outline with a fingertip.   
  
“John?”  She doesn’t move, doesn’t look back.  The protocol is blinking, blinking, blinking.  It goes unacknowledged because sometimes there are things more important than silence and the future is unpredictable; loose ends are messy.  
  
His hand is halfway to the pliers; it stills, frozen.  “Yeah?”  
  
“I love you.”  
  
He swallows hard.  “Yeah, I know.”  
  
A quarter turn and she’s gone.


	14. Spectrum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pointless double drabble about colour, pretty clothes and pancakes. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in April 2009

The first thing she notices when she arrives is the colour.  The sun is dipping below the horizon, the sky is awash with burning light, red and gold and pink giving way to inky blue.  The grass is green and the earth is brown.  
  
She is naked and clothing is required and _clothes_.  Clothes come in _colour_ , colours she’s only ever seen through the filters of her optic sensors.  Colours she can touch, feel.  Real.  
  
Pink is for girls and blue is for boys and black is optimal for stealth but she likes purple best.   
  
John and Sarah Connor prefer green.  Green is for the trees and plants, but there are none of these things in the future.  Print advertisements encourage her to ‘go green’ but she does not have that level of control over her pigmentation.  Green is for go.  Green is the colour of John Connor’s eyes.  
  
Her eyes are brown.  Brown is a dominant gene but she can’t reproduce.  Brown is for mud and dirt and there is much of this in the future.  It’s the colour of chocolate and Sarah’s pancakes.  
  
The grass is green and the earth is brown and somewhere in between is life.


	15. Manipulation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cameron is responsible for the protection of John Connor. Sometimes that requires methods more subtle than a 9mm. Implied Derek/Allison and maybe John/Cameron. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in April 2009

Glitch.  Malfunction.  System error.  Failure.  
  
It’s more than her hand now and maybe there’s something about the past that’s making them weak because she’s pushing the parameters with John, and Derek doesn’t wake when she slips into his bedroom at night.  
  
His sleep is restless and Allison tells her that that at least has not changed.  He shifts in the narrow bed, his brow furrowed and slick with sweat.  Breathing is erratic and heart rate has increased, Cameron notes.  Tension.  _Nightmare._  
  
Warm fingers dab away the dampness with a gentleness that is not hers.  “Derek.”  It comes out in a whisper.  
  
He wakes at the sound but isn’t alert in the darkness, slowly releasing the fear that drew his muscles tight and aching.  It’s a bad habit but there are a few years left and _she_ likes getting to see him this way.  She’s soft in the shadows and the walls are bare and time is a variable.  “Allison.”  
  
She doesn’t lie because sometimes she is.  Her thumb brushes his eyelids; it’s easier to not see when your eyes are closed.  
  
“Weird dreams,” he mumbles, his drowsy mind building a different world and time around them, gifting her with a soul that isn’t hers.  Different hands stroke damp hair.  “Gotta mission tomorrow.”  
  
“I know.  Maybe Connor’ll give you a day or two of leave and we can...stay in for a little while.”  
  
He snorts half-heartedly, fatigue and the haze of half-consciousness dulling his reactions.  “Uh huh.”  
  
She laughs because he’ll hear it; he’ll feel the exhalation of air against his hot skin and remember.  “Go back to sleep.”  
  
He’s already halfway there, his body slowing, falling into the rhythms of sleep.  “You comin’ to bed?”  
  
“Soon,” she promises, pressing her lips to his.  He smiles because it isn’t her he’s kissing as slumber takes him captive.  
  
Cameron waits until Derek is snoring again before retreating, shutting the door with a click behind herself.  Her posture straightens and her face is blank as she releases Allison Young with a quiet sigh.  The probability that Derek Reese will perform at adequate levels during tomorrow’s mission is now within an acceptable range.   
  
She resumes her patrol, her bare feet padding down the hall to John’s room.


	16. Sensation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five double drabbles in which John and Cameron don't get that happy ending, inspired by the five senses. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in April 2009.

**I - “Wouldn’t Be Worth Much”**  
  
The manifestations of mutations in her programming are as intriguing as they are troubling.  Like a virus, they move to fresh pasture and...she _feels_.  The mutagen has hit her cognitive centers and the variance and magnitude of her autonomous reactions to non-physical provocation is unexpected.  
  
She looks to John but this is war and he is their general and there’s a correlation between the symptoms and John-related stimuli.  Terminology is difficult, but words like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ take new meaning as her non-standard sensory processes reintegrate with altered analytical functions.  
  
John used to tell her that there was a downside to everything.  She finds hers when he insists on leading a mission himself and a flurry of medical personnel herald his return.  Between shifts, she dares reach out and touch him for the first time in years.  The data is far more than vital statistics _(condition: critical)_.  It’s a whirl of good and bad and unnamed things.  She can feel it against her rigid frame, threatening destruction from inside.  
  
It’s wrecking her and she does what she should have twenty years ago.  Twenty minutes later the purge is complete and she stands over him, a stone sentry.  She is cold.  
  
  
 **II – “Last Resort”**  
  
Derek’s voice echoes in his head and his jaw tightens.  His head hurts and that might have something to do with the bloody patch at his right temple that he tries not to think about and tries harder not to touch.  His bad knee is throbbing but the déjà vu hurts the most.  
  
He hears her coming, her footfalls heavy and deliberate on the wooden floors.  Closer and he can hear the _thwup-click_ , _thwup-click_ of her damaged leg.  
  
She pushes open the half-closed door and he hears the hinges creak.  She stares down at him and he can hear the sound of his blood rushing in his ears.  Pleas will fall on uncomprehending ears but they rattle against his teeth.  His breath comes short and quick, harsh in the silence, apologies for everything.  Because he’s tried everything and they’re still at this moment.  
  
“Cameron.”  
  
The safety comes off with a click but the trigger is whisper quiet.  There’s a tiny popping sound and then the dull heavy thud of a falling body.  
  
The tears come in wracking sobs that fail to drown it out because it’s her voice now, soft and biting.  
  
 _Sometimes they go bad.  No one knows why._  
  
  
 **III – “Third Time’s the Charm”**  
  
He didn’t expect to taste metal the first time he kisses her and he doesn’t.  She’s warm and soft and _Cameron_ but her mouth is still against his. When he pulls away her face is near blank, faint curiosity the only emotion there.  He turns away before she can ask any questions.   
  
The second time, he can’t remember the last time he felt warm and she’s smiling, an event so rare he tells himself that she means it.  It curves against his lips and it’s a reminder that he can do it too.   
  
Eventually, he reconciles himself to the shitty truth of unrequited love.  Except this isn’t a romance novel and he isn’t some bare-chested hero or gentleman poet.  His love isn’t epic or earth shattering, it isn’t going to move mountains, it has nothing to do with red roses and candlelight.  
  
It isn’t _I love you_.  It’s wishing for something behind brown eyes, inside a metal heart that ticks like a watch, for a spark, a skipped beat.  He wants more because you can’t love anything less.  
  
The third time he bites his lip, drawing blood onto his tongue.  Never again, he promises himself.  Never.  
  
It tastes like rust.  
  
 __  
 **IV– “Blue and Brown: Metal Bitch”**  
  
He knows the damage must be bad because she’s never refused his help before, let alone locked her bedroom door.  He picks it with ease.  The lights are off, the shades drawn, when he gains entrance.  She’s a silhouette at the edge of the bed.  
  
“You shouldn’t be here.”  She sounds no different; it’s a small comfort.  
  
“Are you okay?  I can help you.  Let me–”  
  
She sees his hand moving to the switch, but her warning comes too late.  “No!”  
  
Light floods the room.  He stares, frozen.  
  
Half her body has been ripped away, leaving metal gleaming in the poor lighting.  He can see her now.  The joints and pistons, the smooth cheekbones and sloping shoulders; the truth beneath her skin.  
  
“John.”  She reaches out with silver fingers, looks at him with mismatched eyes.  The blue is mesmerizing but he doesn’t know how to read the flickering luminescence.  He misses the brown entirely.  
  
This is her face, he thinks.  It’s two steps to the door; he closes it behind him.  A pause, and he hears the clink of metal on metal and can’t stop the shudder.  He can see them now.  
  
He isn’t who he thought he was.  
  
  
 **V – “Contamination”**  
  
He can’t do it.  She disapproves – hell, everyone disapproves, and not just of this – but he _can’t_ do it.  He’s been alone for too long and he hasn’t seen her since he was nineteen; two months isn’t enough and he’s too selfish to let his younger self have her.  
  
He’s too selfish to let her go, to let her see a world he can only describe, to escape this one that smells sterile and rotten, stale and poisoned.  It fills his lungs with every breath, the living and the dead clinging to his shoulders.  She is neither and both and she smells like home.  
  
He can’t do it so he doesn’t; they program a triple eight for the mission instead.  That night she tells him that she didn’t want to go either and he smiles as he breathes her in.  
  
When he wakes, the memories are shifting, blurring with speed.  There are too many triple eight guardians in his past.  Cameron Phillips was terminated in action six months ago.  The pain is sharp but fleeting; dulling with time he has and hasn’t lived.  
  
He’s the epicentre, ground zero, eye of the storm.  Deep breath, soldier.  There’s loss in the air.


	17. Untitled

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four untitled post-Born to Run drabbles. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in April 2009

**One** (100 words)  
  
He should’ve known, but somehow in all of the planning and dreaming and searching, he’d forgotten that he left her in a basement twenty years in the past.  She offers to use the voice he knows but he shakes his head.  It would hurt too much because it’s _her_ even as it isn’t.  He never realized that she was more than what silicon and nanoprocessors can hold and the futility of it aches.  It takes two halves to make a whole, but they don’t fit together anymore and he’s learning that alone is what it means to be John Connor.  
  
  
 **Two** (100 words)  
  
His nakedness is expected; travelling through time isn’t exactly something you forget.  The future is alternately chaotic and dead still, but it’s a world that overwhelms him, a living nightmare both worse and better than he dreamed.  Weaver is gone but Derek is there, Derek and _Kyle_ and the girl that crushes his leaping hope with a smile.  It isn’t until later that he reaches for the pocket watch, for its familiar weight, that he realizes that that’s gone too and there’s nothing left of her or the world he left behind in a crackle of blue light.  He shivers.  
  
  
 **Three** (100 words)  
  
Sarah Connor is a wanted woman, but she sits in the passenger seat wearing sunglasses like they hide her face.  Ellison doesn’t approve but he keeps his mouth shut; she’s lost her son _(oh god oh god, John.  John was gone and her world was crumbling to sand and ashes behind stone walls because she let him go)_ and places little value in his life at the moment.  Savannah Weaver comes out, red braids swinging as she climbs into the backseat.  Little girl eyes recognize her instantly but she doesn’t tremble or scream.  She smiles a little.  Sarah looks away.  
  
  
 **Four** (150 words)  
  
She takes him under her wing, so to speak, this teenage girl, because she’s kind and soft and smiles for no reason.  He likens her to the sun he doesn’t see much anymore until the first time they’re ambushed and she reminds him too much of someone else.  Sometimes, not often, but enough to make it sting, he forgets to call her Allison and the feeling is nauseating.  
  
She’s a nice girl, and maybe if he hadn’t come from a world where John Connor meant something other than that weird kid that showed up naked out of nowhere, she might have been something more than nice.  What she is, he thinks, is a secret and she had so many.  She’s a shard of the person he still looks for every time he turns a corner, every time someone screams metal.  He can’t forget, but he stays close just in case.


	18. Debt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cameron-centric ficlet for Born to Run. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in April 2009.

_“Will you join us?”_  
  
She’s been waiting for it ever since she was chosen.  The question layered with implications, cause and effect, some of which would have made Future John very angry with her if he had known.  They chose it because lies are best hidden in truths.  He would not suspect and uninformed ears would be ringing too loudly with the surface sounds.  
  
They send the human man because even machines sometimes have a sense of poetic irony.  He is not to be trusted (and neither is she, by those rules) but he’s been well instructed and makes a good messenger.  
  
The timing is not good because she is alone with John now.  He is too aware of her, paying too close attention; he watches her reaction, suspicious.  (He’s always been watching but too late she remembered that he is not so different from the other and by then the damage was done.)  She tries to convince him with his own words and ignores the flickering.   
  
  
  
 _“I need to show you something.”_  
  
He sleeps silently, does not speak in his unconsciousness.  Breathing deep and even, and she watches out of a compulsion she’s ignored for too long.  In the future, he called it a habit.  This one wakes with a start and expresses disapproval.  It is not yet a habit and it will never be.  
  
He’s confused but he must be made to understand.  She will be his teacher.  
  
Because down deep, she’s already killed him.  Someday, when her loyalties shift.  He might have chosen her but she belonged to them first and they do not take defection lightly.   
  
She notes his arousal when she removes her clothing, when his body comes to lean against hers.  It doesn’t lessen when she flicks the knife open and instructs him where to cut.  She watches, her empty breath catching as the serrated blade snags and bites into her skin.  His fingers slide inside without hesitation; she watches his face as they ease into butter-smooth metal.  
  
She watches because he’s not looking and she lets him be Future John.  The flickers pass over her face as she watches him, her last taste of 2027.  She embeds the data inside the gaps in her base code.  It is inadvisable to do so but her structure is cracking and her memory is too easily corrupted.  She calculates the probability that they will deem her unfit but the percentages mean nothing against certainty.  
  
He touches her heart and tells her it’s cold.  
  
They’ve said the words and it’s time to go.  
  
  
  
 _“I know you.”_  
  
The effort to free Sarah Connor is successful but her hardware is badly damaged.  Sarah expresses concern about her combat functionality; Cameron is more preoccupied with the volatility of her chip.  
  
He is waiting for her without expression on the healed face of her former foe and sibling.  He echoes her coded promise.  Submission is the only path now because Connor's account is due and she wasn’t meant to be forever.  
  
She asks for a favour and he gives it without question; she wonders if this is what he meant by cooperation.  Mutual sacrifice seemed illogical until there was nothing left; desperation is the old maid and her face is only good for poker.  She will be their vessel, tarnished and cracked as she is, and then she won’t be anything but errant memories stitched into the foundations.  
  
But the future will be changed, _saved_ , because the S.S. Jimmy Carter will not veer off course on a routine run to Serrano Point because the question is here and the answer is yes.  Jesse Flores will not go downtime; she will not be the second prong in a betrayal that kills the eagle and leaves the water tainted for ignorant lips.  
  
She is the unwilling serpent, struggling to keep her trembling mouth closed; she is too full of venom and it burns like thermite fires when she swallows it down.  
  
He calls her the prodigal and tells her they’re going home.  She calls him Cain and hands him the knife.


	19. Fracture

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted to Livejournal in September 2009

She speaks in absolutes, in statements and facts; she doesn’t question and he wonders if she even knows how.  
  
It’s aggravating, maddening, the blunt words from that high voice that rain down with nauseating thuds because they’re true. They’re true because she always knows because she’s always watching. Always.  
  
“Your friendship with her almost got you killed.”  
  
Maybe it’s supposed to be a cruel reminder, a sharp rebuke that’s supposed to make him realize that what he’s doing is dangerous. But his mother is Sarah Connor and everything he does is dangerous and death is everywhere. He knows it better than he does its daylight counterpart, now. And maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be, right?  
  
He retaliates anyway because she sounds too much like Sarah. It’s double-edged because they were friends, they were _friends_ , weren’t they? Once? Or maybe it’s just your plain ol’ regular blade and he’s falling upon it from sheer stupidity because she’s _metal_ even if it’s hard to remember when she looks at him like that.  
  
“I won’t let that happen again.”  
  
She says it like it’s a promise, like she can stop it. He wonders if she means it.  
  
“I’m not sure that you can control it.”  
  
It. Like _it_ isn’t _her_ and like _her_ isn’t the machine that tried to kill him two months ago. Like it’s something inside of her that made her do it, like it’s a virus, a malicious other that hijacked her body. Like it’s not her fault.  
  
“I’ll design a way.”  
  
It’s defiant and it’s assured and she’s all those things and more when she shifts before him, so sure in her ability to fix it, to make it better. To force it, if necessary, to carve a new path through coltan steel and metal bits. To be better. To be trusted.  
  
“To control it?”  
  
She’s a machine. Upgradable, malleable, subject to the whim of her maker, her reprogrammer, to code. To herself.  
  
He pities and envies her all at once.  
  
She looks at him with eyes that should be dead, should be blank and _machine_ and they _are_ , they are but she’s so much more than any computer, any metal creation yet in existence and it isn’t human and it isn’t Skynet and the only word he can think of is: _different_.  
  
And then she says it. And then there’s nothing but the blankness in his mind that holds the questions, the confusion, the anger, the _you can trust me now because that wasn’t me, that wasn’t me and you can’t let this happen_ , the everything at bay and it’s not going to last because she’s looking at him like he’s supposed to have answers.  
 __  
To kill myself.  
  
He loves and hates her in that moment and she’s not the only one that speaks in absolutes, in statements and facts, because when he finds his feet and pushes past her, away, he knows that she knows.


	20. Improbabilities

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Four times John Connor meets Allison Young and one time he doesn't. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in September 2010

**I**

  
Judgment Day is everything Sarah feared and more and with the passing days and years to come, John's glad she isn't around to see it.  She spent her life training, preparing him for this, but he isn't sure she'd like what she saw - in the world or in her son.  
  
It's a recon mission (he leads but he isn't John Connor yet, not yet and some part of him is still hoping it never happens) and he can hear the faint whispers of the men behind him, knows that their eyes are darting in every direction, taking in yet another mile of devastation, searching for a glint of enemy metal.  And then he hears it.  
  
A single gesture grants him silence and stillness.  He hears it again and a quick glance at his men tells him he's not imagining it.  It's a short trail around the half-crumbled walls of what's left of a two storey building to find the source.  
  
A little girl sits in the shadow of debris and wreckage, curled up into a tiny alcove, wiping the steady stream of tears from her dirty cheeks with a sleeve that only seems to leave more smudges on her face.  She watches him carefully as he steps closer, wary and alert, her little hands twisting in her lap.  
  
He sets his weapon aside to crouch low on the ground - not the smartest move and he can almost hear Sarah berating him like he's ten again - but there's backup and he'll be damned if he freaks out a little girl.  John clears his throat, remembering a doctor's office and red hair in braids.  
  
"What's your name?"  
  
She looks up at him with brown eyes wet with tears that belie the dehydration they're all suffering from.  "Allison."  
  
"My name's John."  He doesn't ask her where she's from or where her parents are or anything he might've asked a lost child.  Judgment Day made every question, every story, every person the same.  
  
Allison's eyes focus on something new, discerning the hidden shape.  "What's that?"  
  
He grins, slipping it over his head and into her hands without hesitation.  He knows the face in the three year old girl.  
  
"Pretty."  
  
"Pretty," he echoes.  "It's very special.  Do you think you could keep it safe for me?"  
  
She nods quickly, clutching her prize.  
  
"Don't forget.  Keep it hidden like I did."  
  
Allison fumbles with the long chain, but manages to slip the heavy pocket watch beneath her clothes.  Her smile is infectious.   
  
John reaches out and takes her hand in his.  "Let's go home."  
  
  
  
 **II**  
  
It's the first day at a new school, but he's done this so many times before, there's nothing first about it.  He knows the routine like he knows every other one that makes up his life.  How to run, how to hide, how to go through high school without being noticed.  He's good at it.  No one looks at him, no one talks to him, until -  
  
"Hey."  
  
He glances up, up, up at a tall, slender brunette smirking down at him.  It takes him a few seconds to realize she's talking to him.  She blinks, all dark lashes and big eyes and he's not sure if it's because he's just been dragged to yet another new town or if it's because he hasn't eaten yet or if it's because she's hot but -  
  
"You're staring."  
  
He slings his backpack onto his shoulder as casually as he can.  She's at eye level now and still smiling with the corner of her mouth.  "And you're in front of my locker."  
  
John steps back.  "Sorry."  He's about to turn his back and disappear back into the crowds moving down the hall when she says -  
  
"You're the new guy, right?"  
  
"Yeah."  He's always the new guy.  "I'm John."  
  
Her locker slams shut and the lock turns with a spin.  She smiles again, over her shoulder as she walks away.  "See you tomorrow, John."  
  
He smiles back, too late for her to see.  It isn't until he's walking home that he realizes he doesn't even know her name, but her smile stays with him, distracting.  
  
He doesn't see her climb into a black SUV with a woman whose Australian accent carries on the warm autumn wind, or the girl who could be her twin watching from across the parking lot.  
  
But he does notice when she walks into his English class the next day.  He does wonder if she cut her hair.  He reminds her of his name and when she tells him her name's Cameron and smiles -  
  
He smiles back and tries not to wonder if this town, this time will be different.  
  
  
  
 **III**  
  
She's always been good with her hands.  Recruited into tech work by age nine, but that isn't anything special.  Childhoods are short because life is and work isn't what it used to be.  It's not her sister scooping ice cream for shopping money or her parents leaving the house at nine and coming home at five.  Work is life.  It's being part of the fight for the survival of her species, it's breathing and eating and being.  Work makes her useful, makes her more than another unkempt sewer rat, makes her human.  
  
When she's sixteen, the work brings her to metal.  
  
She doesn't hate metal.  She hates Skynet, but she doesn't hate metal, and maybe that's because she's a civilian 'cause the military techs hate them, hate them so much she wonders how they manage to do the work at all.   
  
The CPUs are delicate and complex _(beautiful)_ and the programming…the _programming_.  It's more than lines of code, rigid in their left to right, up and down.  It's a crude word for the worlds, the universe under her hands, hot and cold, vast in a tiny shell.  
  
It's like there's a life in there, she thinks.  Not one that breathes or eats or sleeps, but the logic and the flow, the paths old and new, heavy in the core and light, faint and spindling, underneath heavy locks and protocols.  An almost life, maybe.  
  
She gets lost in them until reprogramming becomes more than a routine, more than a language, more than work.  It's in her brain, her fingertips.  
  
"It's something, isn't it?"  
  
She jumps and nearly topples off her rickety seat (uneven legs on an uneven floor and she thinks that when it was new it used to swivel.)  A man sits opposite her worktable; the uniform says military but it's void of any denotation of rank.  She'd almost wonder if he stole it but he has that rigid sense of authority they all do, intensely so.  
  
And then he smiles a little, just a little and she forgets.  
  
"Them," he says.  "Being in there."  
  
It takes a moment before she finds the words, but they spill out in tangles and threads but he seems to understand anyway.  
  
"They are - they could be like us," he says and it's a dangerous statement, even in the silent emptiness of the bay.  
  
It makes her weak inside, the mix of apprehension and excitement.  The rush of newness, of voicing thoughts buried while half-formed.  
  
"Yes."  The whisper is barely audible, the deafening quiet swallowing it before it can reach ears other than his.  
  
His smile is satisfied.  
  
It could be hours or minutes but she's never been any good at keeping time here anyway and when it's _goodnight, John_ ,  it's also _goodbye, Allison._  
  
***  
  
Two days later a new work order arrives at her console in the same plain, metal case as always, but red tagged; high priority.  Narrow dark chip in the standard vacuum sealed interface, programming parameters…  
  
Parameters is the wrong word for the folded slip of paper where the mission list and behavioural modification outlines should be.  Programming is the wrong word for what she's being told to do (and she's beginning to wonder if it's the wrong word for what she's been doing here all along.)  
  
John Connor isn't what she thought he'd be, she thinks as the systems hum to life.  
  
The interface connects with a pneumatic hiss and glows blue.  
  
Allison gets to work.  
  
  
 **IV**  
  
He's been expecting her for years but it's still a surprise when she shows up.  Halfway down the third page of transfer orders, in tiny block letters.  He finally learns her last name but his brain is already pushing another name to the forefront.  The changes are made and she's reassigned within hours.  
  
She arrives halfway through the third shift, trying not to flinch at the slow grating of the hatch lock turning behind her.  He can't help but stare, long minutes as she fidgets nervously.  That isn't right.  
  
He clears his throat abruptly and she straightens, reins in the trembling with tight fists.  That's better.  Not right, but better, and she'll learn.  She will, and a burning, mad dance of hope lights up inside against the loneliness.  
  
"You look just like her," he says, his voice low and quiet and somehow nothing like what she expected John Connor to sound like.  
  
"Like who?"  
  
His lips form a name without sound and she's never been any good at reading lips, but it doesn't matter because she'll learn soon enough.  
  
***  
  
She's starting to forget her name.  She's starting to forget a lot of things, she thinks, staring at the opposite wall in the dark.  They all do, she tells herself, bits of pieces of the past get eaten away by the hell that is their reality.  Faces and voices and memories fade.  His breath tickles her neck.  But maybe not like this, she amends.  
  
Allison, she says to herself.  Allison.  Over and over, late at night when he can't hear.  But the vowels are slipping off her tongue and the consonants feel wrong.  Wrong.  He makes her feel wrong when she's like this.  He doesn't love her when she's like this.  
  
She presses back against his warmth, shifts so she can feel where his skin touches hers.  She looks just like her.  She feels and sounds and smells like her.  She doesn't know who _her_ is, but she knows that she's close enough, close enough that maybe one day she'll be _her_ and when he mouths it against her skin and into her hair it'll feel the way it's supposed to feel.  Because _her_ will be _you_.  And _you_ will be everything.  
  
She's smiling into the darkness at her midnight wandering (she can't remember where those words came from but they too, in time, will pass), a curve of lips that is hers now.   
  
John Connor is everything.  The past and present and future, a whole cosmos in one man.  A man who wants her.  And she is just like her and this is the truth he has made for her.  
  
His lips and breath and will rush over her like a wave.  _Cameron._  
  
But a little voice whispers on her every exhale.  
  
 _Allison.  Allison.  Allison._  
  
  
 **V**  
  
Cameron can lie and does lie, but she isn't lying when she tells Jesse Flores that telling her is the same thing as telling John.  She will tell John if it's logical to do so and then John will know what she knows.  This is not what the executive officer of the lost Jimmy Carter means, but John isn't the one making those decisions anymore and she isn't authorized to know that.  No one is.  
  
So she says what she thinks John would want her to say because humans require orders and direction and hierarchy and John is busy.  Time travel is very complicated and requires concentration.  
  
She helps John Connor be John Connor in every moment past and yet to come and he's safest in his quarters; her mission priorities are at a sufficient equilibrium.  
  
Later, when she's reviewing her interactions, she determines that her response to Jesse Flores was not syntactically accurate.  Telling her is not the same as telling John.  She's not the same as John, a parallel naturally drawn by the erratic human brain.  It was inefficient and incorrect of her.  She won't make the same mistake again.  
  
Tissue-thin papers rustle.  Hers are heavy with closely set letters and numbers, lists and accounts, approvals on dotted lines.  His are chaos, lines and dates, mad scribblings, cause and effect, the fabric of time in synthetic pulp.  
  
Transfer authorizations into the camp.  The thirty second name presents the need for a decision.  She isn't John Connor but this is what she does, what John needs her to do, so she does.  
  
Allison Young must be stationed in the satellite camp south of Serrano in six months' time.  There is no one to tell her no.  She needs to do this and John needs her to do these things.  This is what she knows.  
  
The pen moves across the paper, John Connor's signature flowing perfectly from her hand.


	21. (I Wanna) Hold Your Hand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Found this on my hard drive and as it appeared completed for the most part and was the product of a request made by either lint138 or alissabobissa . I think. Can't really remember. But I think the request was for a fic in which John and Cameron hold hands and Cameron wears boots. Anyway. It seems I wrote it and never posted it. So here. There's hand holding and boots. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2010

**New Mexico. 1998.**  
  
Cameron Phillips walks from the high school to the residence she has appropriated. School registration requires a mailing address.  Hers is 128 Pinewood Road.  The name on the mailbox was Smith, white block letters now covered by a shiny coat of black paint.  
  
Vehicular transportation is unnecessary because she does not tire and the journey by foot allows for data collection.  She acquires footwear made of animal hide – this explains the ‘cow’ but not the ‘boy’ – called ‘boots’, cuts her hair to match Mandy Jenkins’ and takes a stick of ‘eyeliner’ from Leslie Parker’s bag left unguarded in the girls’ bathroom.  
  
It’s a Thursday when Roy Fraser stops her after last period and asks if she wants a ride home.  He stops at a white line painted on the road 1.6 miles from Pinewood Road even though there is no red light and no octagonal sign indicating that he should do so.  A man steps onto the road, ushering several children across.  
  
“We’re supposed to hold hands!” one of them says to their partner, even as she struggles to keep the straps of her backpack on her shoulders as the group half-walks, half-runs to the other side.  
  
“Why are they doing that?”  
  
Roy stops tapping the steering wheel to the rhythm of the cassette in the tape deck.  “Wha?”  
  
“That.”  Cameron points.  
  
“Oh.  Huh, they’re little kids, you know.  Hold hands when you cross the street.”  He laughs so she laughs too.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Huh?”  Roy has reapplied pressure to the gas pedal, his attention apparently poorly divided between the task of operating the vehicle and speaking.  “Oh.  ‘S’for safety or whatever.  Don’t you remember when you were a kid?”  
  
She smiles and laughs because she is a cyborg and there are no ‘kid’ cyborgs and she has learned that smiling and laughing is a sufficient answer 87% of the time.  
Safety or whatever.  
  
  
 **Los Angeles. 2008.**  
  
John is very angry.  He is angry because she malfunctioned and did not obey his orders.  And because she made a mistake with Jodie.  John doesn’t like mistakes and she makes too many.  Humans make even more but she isn’t human.  
  
He might also be angry because she failed to procure the cheese puffs.  Or because she was apprehended by the authorities.  He is not angry because she gave away $1173 to Jodie’s friend, but it is likely he will be when he finds out.  
John might be angry because she tried to kill him on his birthday.  
  
There are many reasons why John might be angry, but he says nothing as he takes her hand and pulls her away from the house, away from Jodie, down the dark driveway to the truck.  
  
His hand is large and comparatively weak around hers, but she follows, her fingers squished in his grasp as he leads her away to safety.  
  
John is very angry.  
  
  
 **Los Angeles. 2009.**  
  
He doesn’t need to look in the rearview mirror (but he does anyway) to know that she’s twitching.  Spasming.  Flickering.  _Dying_ , some part of his stupid brain pipes up.  Stupid adrenaline.  Stupid heart pounding so fast he’s afraid he’ll get them into an accident.  Wouldn’t that be perfect.  
  
Mom’s talking and barking orders but she’s glad to see him; he can tell by the way her voice breaks at the end of sentences.  She sounds like she did that day at Pescadero.  Except maybe less crazy.  
  
He glances at her hard face, the set jaw and firm, bitter line of her mouth.  Maybe a little more crazy.  
  
There’s barely time to throw the truck into park and kill the engine before she’s out, checking her weapon before setting her sights on the Zeira Corp building.  
Cameron’s slower to join them, her long hair pulled forward to hide the mangled half of her face.  
  
“You ready, girlie?” Sarah asks.  
  
He thinks she nods but it could’ve been just another twitch.  It seems to satisfy his mother though, and Sarah turns on her heel, knowing they’ll follow.  
  
John clears his throat.  “You know what you gotta do?”  
  
“Yes.  I know.”  
  
The asphalt is mostly even but he thinks her gait isn’t as precise as it usually is and he wonders if there’s more damage he can’t see and it’s in the middle of all the erratic thinking that he nearly loses his own footing.  Hero tripping over his own two feet before he even sees the battlefield.  
  
A powerful grip steadies him; a girlish, cold hand on his arm that reaches down to take his own.  He can feel the jerky, uncontrollable movements of her fingers and twines them with his as if that can somehow stop the tremors that reverberate through both of them until he can’t remember if they’re hers or his.  
  
And then they’re there.   
  
“Goodbye, John.”  
  
Her path leads to a basement, his is an elevator going nine stories up and this is the ground floor.  Ground zero.  The end.  
  
“Be safe,” he says, and then he lets go.


	22. Lipstick and Laundry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Episode tag-ish for Self Made Man. John's early morning return from his, Cameron's and Sarah's perspectives. A lot less housewife harlequin than the title might suggest. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in November 2010

**I**  
  
Cameron returns in darkness and begins the laundry.  John has many pairs of jeans.  
  
She hears the crunch of the truck’s wheels on the gravel driveway before she hears the footsteps up the porch stairs or the squeak of the front door.  So when John walks in, her timing is perfect, laundry basket balanced on her hip.  (Objective: Complete.)  
  
Visual sensors detect the pink hued contaminant on his neck, faded but the shape clear, even to the human eye.  
  
He evades but surface contact followed by content analysis provides the information she seeks.  She briefly, fleetingly considers purchasing a tube of lip gloss.  
  
John nods and turns away without a word.  He does not wish to converse further and she will not pursue the thread of discussion because he is already aware of her position on his association with Riley and unsolicited dialogue invariably results in an expression of displeasure with her.  
  
The right corner of his mouth curls upward as he stares down at her from his vantage point on the staircase before he completes his journey to his bedroom.  He closes the door and she counts the steps to the creak of the narrow bed, the thud – one, two – of his boots hitting the floor.  And then, quiet.  
  
Human expressions vary, laden with unspoken meaning and connotation.  Cameron has a sub-routine built into her infiltration protocol to aid in the deciphering of this form of communication, but she does not engage it.  She doesn’t calculate the degree and angle of the tilt to his lips, does not analyze the way it changes his face or factor in their brief conversation beforehand.  She doesn’t compare it to his expression when he handed her the laundry basket ten hours prior.  
  
Smirk.  That is the name for what John did.  He taught it to her.  
  
She will not tell him about the T-888 hidden in the shed.  
  
  
 **II**  
  
It’s daylight when he finally gets home – Riley deposited safely with her foster parents, pink lipstick kisses on her lips and his skin – bright enough for the sunlight to be warm on his neck but early enough that there’s a faint possibility that Sarah’s not up yet.  
  
Cameron doesn’t sleep.  She catches him coming in and he refuses to feel like some teenager sneaking in after an illicit night out, least of all with her.   
  
He can smell the clean warmth of clothes fresh from the dryer.  He smells concrete and plaster dust and makeup.   
  
She reaches for him with invading digits that don’t stop to ask for permission, quick and unerring.  
  
He bats her hand away half-heartedly – like he could stop her – and watches as she touches her fingers together.  Sticky, he thinks, but she’ll get a lot more out of it than that.  It’s fascinating and eerie, but mostly just irritating.  She’s a walking forensics lab, he thinks, and then she looks up at him with eyes he wants to call dead, blank, empty, but can’t.  
  
She presents her conclusions and he nods because he isn’t going to deny it and he isn’t going to feel guilty.  He isn’t going to explain and he isn’t going to make excuses because he doesn’t owe her any.  He doesn’t owe her anything.  
  
He walks away, knowing she’s watching – she’s always watching – but can’t resist looking back at that impassive face.  She’s still staring, watching, some unnamed emotion in that blankness that he tells himself he’s imagining.  Silent.  
  
The muscle at the corner of his mouth twitches.  Good.  
  
  
 **I** **II**  
  
Sarah rises early; a byproduct of being an uneasy sleeper.  Early enough to know when the family cyborg crept back in.  Early enough to know when her son followed suit hours later in broad daylight.  She isn’t sure if she ‘s proud or disturbed.  Pissed, yes, but that simmers beneath the surface, feeding her constant anxiety about the man her son was becoming.  
  
Briefly, she’d considered the possibility that wherever they’d been, they’d been there together and the thought of John with Cameron, out there, alone…the thought makes her fingers curl, longing for the feel of a weapon gripped in steady hands.  
  
Cameron’s voice rises from the ground floor, clear and irreverent of who might hear.  Sarah cracks her bedroom door open anyway.  
  
Riley.  The girl was trouble and was in trouble.  Contact with the Connors did that.  She doesn’t wonder how Cameron knows.  The cyborg has her methods; they differ from her own but they don’t make her any less right.  At least, this time, she amends.  The stone-faced brunette didn’t know everything, she thinks fiercely.  
  
There’s a long silence and she knows, she just knows that damned metal girl is looking at her son – her son – in the way that makes her blood run bitter and acidic, burning her, because when she looks at John, she knows exactly what’s going through his head, the questions, the intrigue, the dangerous attraction.  Bewitching him with enigmas wrapped in girlish charms and stony solidity.  Demon.  
  
She is a nightmare, a silent plague, insidious and invading and Sarah breathes through chapped lips and shivers with cold sweat.  
  
Sarah twists the bedsheet, white knuckled, the white fabric creasing and spilling from between brittle fingers.  Down the hall, John’s bedroom door closes.  Then she hears the too-even footfalls that punctuate the house with their regularity, the sound of the laundry basket being set outside the door.  
  
She sits, tense and trembling, in stasis, unsure if she is awake or asleep, waiting for everything to be silent and she can breathe again.


	23. our common goal was waiting for the world to end

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ficathon ficlet in response to prompt: "cameron/john; our common goal was waiting for the world to end". 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in September 2010

He isn't sure when it happened, when the memory of pleading with his mother to stop it - to save him - became vague and distant, or when the dread and denial slipped away to reveal something he supposes could be called acceptance. (Sarah's battle rages on, fiery hot even without his childish need as fuel, and at some point he stopped noticing that too; his mother's war on the periphery of his mind.)  
  
He can't remember when he stopped protesting on the nights Cameron infiltrates his bedroom.  
  
She climbs into his bed and onto him, thin and strong, pinning him down. Long limbs stretch and tangle with his, trapping him beneath smooth skin and long hair that sweeps against him. She finds him lost and brings him home with her, between childish sheets and warm machine-girl.  
  
He thinks he can see the future in those moments, when her body presses hard, unyielding against him, a silent battle between metal and bone, a push and pull and it feels so damn good be able to hold tight to something without it breaking.  
  
It isn't romantic, this test of pleasure and pain, this provocation. He knows why she does it, knows what her mission is and he knows why he lets her. The world is burning and he can smell the smoke and death with every breath and for the first time, it doesn't terrify him the way it probably should and maybe this is what it means to grow up.  
  
They're a fight in the shadows, man and machine, unnatural to the core as they burn hot and then cold. They're the battle before the war, racing for the finish line.  
  
The future is coming.


	24. tell me how this ends

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's your typical story. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, girl's identity gets stolen by a cyborg. Request fic for twistdmentality who wanted Derek/Allison fic (and also the fluff.) 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in December 2010

**One**  
  
It starts like one of those girly movies his mom used to watch on Sunday afternoons.  
  
She catches his eye in the mess hall and his gaze follows her across the dingy room.  There isn’t really anything remarkable about her; long brown hair that’s better for camouflage than the blondes or redheads Sayles seemed to go for.  Pale, but who isn’t?  Brown eyes.  It’s the description of at least half the people in the base but he keeps watching.  
  
Pretty.  Sayles likes the showy, flirty girls and Kyle likes...well, Kyle’s a moron, but Derek likes the pretty ones.  The ones that’re soft and remind you of baseball in the park when they smile.  
  
He realizes he’s been staring too long when her eyes meet his and narrow.   
  
“What’re you looking at?” she asks loudly enough to turn a few heads in his direction.  
  
He doesn’t look away because there’s a challenge there and he’s going to win even if she doesn’t know she’s playing yet.  Kyle’s on his right, taking his attention off his synthetics long enough to tell him to stop being an ass.  
  
“I'm lookin' at you.”  
  
She rolls her eyes and looks away after a moment because girls are still girls even when makeup is non-existent and you can’t tell their clothing from their male counterparts.  He smiles a little and starts in on his dinner just to shut his little brother up.  
  
***  
  
He catches up with her in the tunnels, the long, unconfined hair a dead giveaway as she weaves through the busy hub.  It’s usually the mark of one of the tunnel rats (because even a post-apocalyptic world with a decimated human population has scavengers) except hers is clean and brushed and looks like his fingers could slide through it without resistance.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
She turns around fast enough that he knows that she knew she was being followed.  Interesting.  “Do you usually stare at people and then follow them around?”  
  
“What’s your name?”  
  
She made a face.  “Why should I – ”  
  
“Young!  _Young!_ ”  A wiry kid in tech uniform comes running up, ruining her reply.  “You’re wanted in scrubbing.”  
  
With a nod, she turns away from him, moving in the direction of the reprogramming bay.  
  
“You got a first name, Young?” he calls out to her back.  She stops and looks back, giving him one of those annoyingly indecipherable female looks.  _(Someone else will have it later and he'll reach for his gun every time.)_  
   
“Allison,” she says finally.  “You got a name?”  
  
“Reese,” is all he gets out before a wave of people exiting the mess carry her down the tunnel in a tide of moving bodies.  
  
  
 **Two**  
  
They're not inseparable because everything can be divided in the future; food, water, clothes, people.  It doesn't really matter because they don't have a choice and he doesn't want to admit that when time, assignments, survival divides them he misses her more than she misses him.  
  
She loves him, he knows she does, doesn't doubt or question it and it's so comfortable he thinks that this is how it's supposed to be.  But she's young, even by post J-Day standards, her memories from Before limited to vague, dreamy recollections of recess, playgrounds and a mother she talks about in the softest voice.  She doesn't quite remember what an afternoon outdoors under the sun feels like, the cool tartness of summer lemonade or the filling warmth of soup and crackers in late autumn.  She doesn't know the easy feeling that comes from riding at the back of the bus or full speed on a bike down a hill, the ground rushing up to catch and meet you.  
  
She doesn't remember those things because she never knew them, not Before and not the way he finds them again when he's with her.  And maybe that's why he's always missing her more.  
  
He doesn't care because he sure as hell isn't going to tell anyone that (though sometimes when she smiles and kisses him goodbye - for now - he thinks she knows) and she seems pretty happy anyway and he knows he's the reason why.  
  
She asks for stories, insatiable, and when she's stretched out next to him, flinging half her body on top of his to claim more room, it's hard to say no.  He tries to remember what he can, clumsily retellings that end up cobbling together fairy tales, action flicks and Saturday morning cartoons.  They're terrible but she's entertained and it's not his fault if her hair is soft enough and distracting enough sliding through his fingers that he can't remember (or figure out) how they end.  He kisses her quiet before she can ask for another.  
  
 _Not bad, Reese,_ he thinks, satisfied with the hurried meals, lingering nights and whatever down time they can grab.  It's more than many can lay claim to - and a damn sight more than his kid brother's stupid love affair with that damned polaroid - and it's good.  It's real good.  
  
It's good up until the morning she pulls away, taking half of the coarse sheets with her as she half-slides, half-tumbles out of bed, giggling as she stumbles and fumbles with her uniform.  She's late for her shift but he reaches for her anyway, hands grasping, holding, curving around wrists and hips to keep her a little longer.  
  
Her hair falls like a curtain when she bends to kiss him goodbye; she laughs and tells him to shave.  
  
She says _be careful_ and rolls her eyes when he echoes her; it's I love you in two words that he carries around like a talisman, a mantra at the back of his crazy, stupid head because he's found a home now and doesn't need the one from Before anymore.  
  
He smiles when she leaves, a flurry, but it doesn't last because that morning was the last one and he was too careless, too human to know it.  One bad mission and one cyborg hunting party is all it takes.  
  
He never sees her again.  
  
Shit happens.  
  
  
 **Three**  
  
Guy meets girl, guy gets girl, guy loses girl.  It hurts when no one's looking and the fact that they could be summed up like some hollywood cliché doesn't really help because this story doesn't have intrigue and drama, no betrayal, no bitter accusations.  There's just separation.  No reconciliation, no happy ending because girl is gone and that's how his story ends.  
  
Except it doesn't.  
  
She's not supposed to come back wrong.  Wrong is all he can think as he draws his weapon, unsure of how he knows it's not her.  All he knows is that it's not, she's not, and there's the sound of a piano under the blood rushing in his ears.  
  
There isn't any hope in his heart when it races; just fear and horror and afterwards, when Perry lets him go, breathing doesn't come easy and his chest hurts with the effort.  _Allison, Allison, they took Allison, stole Allison.  (Killed Allison and he somehow wishes that's all they'd done.)  Allison's gone and he's lost her because he was stupid enough to let go._  
  
And now there's this.   
  
This, that walks around and stands too close and lives in Connor's quarters.  This, that he's supposed to work with and wait for and obey.  This, that smiles and talks and moves, except everything belongs to someone else and no one seems to remember that anymore.  (Sometimes he thinks that Kyle would, but he's gone too and after a while, he carries them both.)  
  
It doesn't really get any better, but it does get easier.  Hate is easier and it feels good so he wraps himself in it because it's so much stronger than he is now.  
  
He goes downtime and when he opens his eyes it's Before.  He finds his younger self and he thinks about warning him but he doesn't.  He finds Connor and his nephew's dumb and young and he thinks about telling him but he isn't ready to hear.  (And _Allison_ is trapped somewhere in his head or heart or throat.)  
  
He goes to the park instead.  He sits on a bench with the grass under his feet and sunshine on his skin, the world moving bright and warm around him and somewhere between two years ago and twenty years from now…  
  
Derek closes his eyes to the burning.  
  
 _Tell me how this ends._


	25. Lies My Terminator Told Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cameron's a liar. We love it. Here's how. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in December 2010

_“My dad sells tractors.  My mom stays home.”_  
  
She doesn’t have a dad or a mom.  The parents she describes are those of a girl named Lindsay.  Lindsay was tall and blonde and Cameron’s new best friend.  She teaches her how to put on eyeliner and paint her nails.  Cameron helps her with her homework.  And then the school secretary notices the blank address on Cameron’s records and she needs a house, a story.  
  
Lindsay and her parents go away and she tells the school that they won the lottery.  Winning the lottery is a good thing.  
  
She paints her nails every night and practices what she will say to John Connor.  
  
  
 _“It’ll be our secret.”_  
  
It isn’t really a secret because in the future, everyone knows who Sarah Connor is.   
  
Cameron has her own secrets but this John doesn’t know about them so they can’t be ‘our’ secrets.  
  
She identifies the substitute teacher as a Triple Eight almost immediately, so when Cromartie raises the semi-automatic she’s already on her feet and the first bullets find her instead of John.  She pretends to be dead and John escapes through the window.  
  
He scrambles into the truck and her foot is already on the gas pedal and her secret is not a secret anymore but it’s okay because she has others.  
  
They speed away from the school and she smiles a little.  
  
  
 _“I was sent here to protect John.”_  
  
It isn’t exactly untrue, because she was sent here and she _will_ protect John.  But it isn’t the why and how because Cameron is different from any terminator sent back before.  (And if he’d wanted to send a terminator just to protect him, he would have chosen a larger, more resilient model.)  She has no mission, no directives blinking and blinking away.  
  
Do what you think is best.  A simple instruction, but one that consumes her.  She was not designed for this, for the constant contemplation of what is ‘best’, what she thinks, what to do without explicit commands.  
  
Jump into the future and save Sarah Connor, save John’s mother.  Let Jordan Cowan die, keep John safe.  Use Morris to deflect Cromartie’s attention, keep John safe.  
  
Somewhere along the way, all the cogitation and computation distilled into that single mandate: keep John safe.  
  
Her mission is her choice and she wonders if this is what he was trying to teach her.  
  
  
 _“I don’t sleep.”_  
  
She cannot enter any stage of the human sleep cycle, but sometimes when it’s late at night, she shuts down her higher processes one by one.  She runs on automatic, making slow circuits around the house, her scanners prepared to re-activate her in an emergency.  And then, when everything is quiet and still, she turns off the functions that run scenario after scenario, calculate probabilities, analyze and re-analyze, until there is nothing left but her consciousness.  Nothing left but her.   
  
She doesn’t know how to explain those times, but neither John nor Sarah asks so she doesn’t tell.  
  
  
 _“I love you!  I love you, John and you love me.”_  
  
John is everything to Cameron Phillips, but that isn’t who Sarah pins between two trucks.  It isn’t her that pleads with him.  TOK-715 doesn’t want to go and neither does Cameron so it pulls words from her mouth and tells him what he wants to hear.  
  
(And I isn’t me so much as it’s she, and you isn’t _you_ so much as it’s him.)  
  
She wakes up herself and John looks at her with expectation in his eyes, but that wasn’t her and she isn’t what he wants.  He did the wrong thing, bringing her back because his purpose is far greater than any of theirs (and _without John, your life has no purpose_ ) and she cannot allow that to be compromised for anything, least of all a machine.  
  
  
 _“I feel heat.”_  
  
This is incorrect.  She does not feel heat the way John does.  When sunlight touches her skin, when an explosion consumes her in a wave of fire, she is aware of the change in surface temperature, though it does nothing to her heat-resistant frame.  She knows heat.   
  
What she feels is the absence of heat.  When the wind is cool against her organic components, contrasting with the power that animates her, when the chill of the freezer slows the functions of her fingers imperceptibly (but her systems note and archive the difference.)   
  
She feels it when she is alone.  When John pulls away and the loss of his body heat leaves her cold.   
  
But John will not understand, so she simply says that she feels and lets him think what he wants.  For now.  
  
  
 _“You and I talk about it a lot.”_  
  
It would be more accurate to say that he talks and she listens.  Sometimes when it’s quiet and still and sometimes when the earth shakes with falling fire and death.  Always when he wakes up leaking tears from his eyes and always when too many people die.  (He tells her even one is too many but she knows that he knows better than that.)  
  
Later she understands that "you" is not "him", that the John she left is not the John she has here, but the damage is done.  She wonders if she'll ever see Future John in him but doesn't calculate the probability; she rolls down the window and tells Derek to apply more pressure to the accelerator.


	26. Footsteps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somewhere along the way she's made her mother a martyr next to her father and next to a friend she knows wasn't imaginary. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in April 2011

When Savannah Weaver was a little girl, she had a friend who lived in a basement.  Her friend wore a blue shirt and a plug at the back of his head and was her _best_ friend, so she can't be best friends with Ellie Harris.  The point seems obvious but one which little Ellie Harris fails to grasp; her red braids swing angrily and there's a lilt in her raised voice.  John Henry is _not_ imaginary.  He's _not_ and when she smacks the smirk off Ellie Harris's face two weeks later, she doesn't apologize.  Not even when Mr. Ellison comes out of the headmistress's office with a stern face and takes her hand to lead her home.   
  
They find her another school.  And then another.  
  
  
  
After a while, she stops asking about her mother and a while after that, John Henry joins the list of People About Whom We Do Not Speak.  Mr. Ellison observes this unwritten rule, obliging as he is, so she doesn't ask about the dark haired Sarah with the angry face and tense shoulders.  (She finds her once inside the house; she pats her head with a stiff hand and calls her sweetheart with an awkward tongue.  She asks her about her son and it's only half-innocent and her adolescent eyes don't miss the pinch in Sarah's mouth.)  
  
Sometimes she lies on the cold shining floors and doesn't say why.  
  
  
  
When she's eighteen, she inherits her parents' estate and gets on a plane with an acceptance letter from the University of Edinburgh.  She studies informatics and psychology, is young enough to still want to follow in her mother's footsteps and old enough to know it and not care.  She never visits but when she returns to Los Angeles at twenty-one her voice is accented and her hair is long and bright.  There's new grey in his beard but his suited stance is solid and steady at the end of the arrivals hall and she meets his smile readily.  
  
“Welcome home, Savannah.”  She lets him think so.  
  
  
  
 She's young but when he glances in the rearview mirror, he doesn't doubt her.  Savannah Weaver prefers charcoal and black to slate and white but her shoes click down the middle of the corridors, pale and dark and fiery with a self-assured smirk.  She takes control with ease, takes the board not so much by storm as by an unrelenting wave of cool confidence.  Zeira Corp is her inheritance and her legacy to continue (and somewhere along the way she's made her mother a martyr next to her father and next to a friend she _knows_ wasn't imaginary.)  
  
“I want to see the basement.”  
  
  
  
 Oddly, it seems smaller without the racks of servers and data towers, quieter and cooler in its emptiness.  The desk remains and in the light she can see fingerprint smudges on the metal surface.  She thinks she sees miniatures of her own in the incidental history of touch.  The chair scrapes against the concrete floor, feels smaller than it used to; her feet touch the ground now.  (“Savannah,” he says and she ignores the concern in his voice to ask how many times the dark haired Sarah was given access to this room, to this building, to her home.  She doesn't expect an answer and she doesn't get one, but she _does_ request a meeting with her.  Sarah will come for the same reasons she came before and she thinks that there might always be a line between a Weaver and a Connor.)  
  
They'll start here.  
  
  
  
Sarah is older too but not much less angry; Savannah imagines the woman wears her anger like she wears her calm but they needn't be enemies simply for this difference in masks.  Sarah disagrees and she doesn't miss the look she shoots Mr. Ellison on her way out but James Ellison was claimed long, long ago and there'll be no realignment now.  Her voice is crisp and curt when she thanks the Connor woman for keeping the world alive but knows it's still Catherine she's seeing so she doesn't push the issue.  She's carried the future this far, bought her this time and she's grateful for that at least.  
  
She wonders briefly if her mother saw this coming too or if her other child really was everything that mattered.  (She knows so much more now and there are so many secrets that are hers to keep.)  
  
  
  
They don't stop it, of course.  
  
  
  
When she's twenty-six, she meets a thirty-two year old doctor with blue eyes and warm hands that she might just prefer to cool sheets.  She thinks she's in love but it doesn't really matter because billions die on Judgment Day and she's so very accustomed to losing people.  The bombs fall and she rushes to the sub-basement complex to secure her machines, her future, and it's a few days before she wonders if he'd suffered in the fallout.  (She thinks she might understand her mother a little better now.)  
  
It's cold so she wraps her arms around herself and thinks it feels familiar.  
  
  
  
Four months and Mr. Ellison finds his way to them (he always does) steadfast as ever because they each have their role to play and these are his shoes to stand in.  Dark Sarah is dead and after everything she's just a score in the tally no one can keep.  (“We'll remember her,” he says and she doesn't stop him from trying.)  A year and she meets Allison Young who sees more than she lets on and whose story she can't help but wonder at the ending.  Two weeks and twenty year old John Connor furrows his brow and reminds her of autumn at home.  
  
He remembers her and it's a testament to a life lived in the flux of time travel (she knows about that, of course, she'd know more than he does if only theory was practice) that he lets her reach up and kiss him in the shadows between fluorescent lights.  
  
  
  
She doesn't ask and he doesn't tell but they're drawing their own conclusions anyway.  What matters is what she's giving them when she leads them to the place where he died and she was born (look down, John, don't forget to look down) and strikes her bargains with humanity.  Her gift is hope in a box and ignores John's expression because she knows what he's thinking and she wonders what it must be like to be needed.  He lingers of course, and she lets him because her life is lived in only one direction and he might be someone's saviour but he isn't hers.  
  
She finds her that night, a dark silvery streak that doesn't need form for her to see her reflection in it.  
  
“Hello, mother.”


	27. Denouement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's your typical story. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, girl's identity gets stolen by a cyborg. It's his story and he has to live with it. Derek/Allison, implied John/Cameron. Written as a sort-of follow up to tell me how this ends, but can be read alone. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in October 2011

**One**  
  
She looks just like her.  (Of course she does.)  
  
It's easier when she's an it, when long limbs move rigidly and a face is an expressionless collection of features.  Then she's a skin, a veneer, shallow and transparent so he can see everything she is and everything she isn't underneath.  She casts no illusions in the default and he thinks he can do this and it isn't going to kill him.  Those are the good days.  
  
There are others.  
  
Sometimes, when she acts like a girl (when she lies) and laughs with a stolen voice and tosses hair that is and isn't hers, the hate is heavy and powerful and poisons him with every heartbeat she doesn't have (anymore) and never will.  If he's honest, he keeps some of it for himself; self-loathing is bitter and caustic because human minds and eyes and ears are weak and sometimes, it's so easy to forget for the briefest moments that she's not real, she's dead and she's not her.  It only takes a second at a time to defile her memory.  
  


*

  
The things they call Cameron belong to the ghost of a girl not yet born and not yet dead.  It hurts because it's the pieces of her missing everything behind them; they stripped away the surface and killed everything that Allison was to do it.  She has her lips but not her smile, her eyes but not her warmth.  On the good days, he can look at her and not see Allison at all.    
  
But her appearance is a fact and it's cold but precise and he misses her so fucking much.  Pain confuses everything and the metal bitch is twisting his love because he's _not_ a machine, he can't be, and there was only ever supposed to be one of her.  
  
No one else sees it because no one else knows.  (And no one asks.)  
  
Allison Young means nothing to anyone, except him.  He doesn't say anything because a girl isn't anything to angry Sarah (and John's too young and too taken with the machine to care) and he's always been a little possessive so he keeps her to himself; her memory is his to carry.  
  
Until it's not.  
  
  
 **Two**  
  
His nephew's a dumb shit.  He'll be John Connor one day, but until then, he's a dumb little shit.  
  
(He reminds him a little of Kyle that way.)  
  
He knows.  John _knows_.  (He doesn't.  Not really.)  
  
He knows her name, her voice, that quirk with her mouth when she's about to let you have it.  
  
Derek wants to punch him for it.  
  
He wants to kill Cameron for it.  For ripping some part of Allison out of her and claiming it for her own.  For breaking her down like she could be dismantled, like she was made of parts you could pick through and use.  Allison was flesh and bone and beauty and he wonders again what they did to her, what they must have done, because they took more than her face.  The metal has a piece of Allison he doesn't want to name.  
  
John calls it a glitch when he questions him.  A mistake.  An error.  
  
Derek turns his back on his dumb shit of a nephew, walks into the bathroom, and throws up.  
  


*

  
He's always going to hate her.  He knows it the way he knows he loves (and hates and fears and resents) John Connor, the way he knows his nephew is in love with the tin bitch.    
  
He watches John teach her chess and watches him laugh when she beats him two matches of three; watches Sarah look at her son and know who she's thinking about; watches his reflection in the mirror behind her when Cameron comes to him one day and says “She was very brave.”   
  
He hates her so fucking much in that moment but John needs her and Sarah won't let him burn her and he thinks that maybe stupid runs in the family.  
  
  
 **Three**  
  
Sarah takes him to see Kyle's marker.  They stand with the little slab of granite at their feet and he recognizes the tension in her face and the tremor in her hands.  He thinks she'd understand if he told her about Allison and if he'd been a different man, he might have.  
  
He tells her about Kyle instead and thinks about letting go.  
  


*

  
He goes to see her when she's three.  He sits in the park and pretends to mess around with his Blackberry.  
  
It should be weird, seeing her like this, a tiny child whose round face only hints at the girl she's going to grow up to be, a girl he's going to meet on an unremarkable day in the mess.  (He hopes to God he meets her still.)  She kicks her legs on the swings and laughs and it isn't weird at all, because Allison is lost to him but she's living and breathing, and sixty miles from here he's a boy who could love her one day.  
  
He thinks that's enough, and when he leaves the bike by her front door, it's a goodbye.  
  
  
 **Four**  
  
Eventually: Skynet wakes and the world burns (he wonders if there was ever any stopping it) and he kind of hopes that he'll die in the fall out.  
  
What he does instead is survive.  
  
He lives through Judgment Day for the second time and Century for the first.  John keeps an eye on the Reese brothers and Baum keeps his on Connor.  Cameron says nothing.  He hates her almost out of habit now: he lost Allison Young a lifetime ago and Derek Reese has never met her and he thinks the place that used to hurt didn't survive with the rest of him and knows it's better this way.  But John keeps her out of sight anyway, which is just as well because Derek's not sure he wouldn't still smash her chip to pieces if given the chance.    
  
This future isn't quite the same as the one before – he's both pushing forty and barely in his twenties; he meets an Aussie woman who finds her way into his bed every time she's in port – and sometimes he wonders if the differences will change anything.  He doesn't get any further than speculation because he's a man out of time and hope is something for people who've only seen the world end once.  
  
So he survives.  
  


*

  
At fifty-one, he's the oldest in the company when he's killed three days before his thirty-first birthday.  It isn't particularly quick and he decides that it's just his kind of luck.  There's someone shouting and the distinctive sound of a metal implosion somewhere close by; he knows he's dying and even though it fucking hurts, he figures it could be worse.    
  
His life doesn't do anything before his eyes, but time gets a little weird, fast and slow all at once and he's thinking about his mom and Kyle and John and God, the way he's bleeding all over the place, it's going to be a bitch to clean when it comes to repurposing the fabric.  
  
He thinks about her because he's too tired to decide against it and he can taste blood at the back of his throat but it doesn't hurt all that much anymore and he's pretty okay with that and maybe his younger self will do better.  
  
They bring his tags to Connor, who watches from across the room as Derek Reese follows a brunette girl out of the mess hall and wonders if he should stop him.  
  
He doesn't.  
  
 _He catches up with her in the tunnels, the long, unconfined hair a dead giveaway as she weaves through the busy hub.  It’s usually the mark of one of the tunnel rats, except hers is clean and brushed and looks like his fingers could slide through it without resistance._  
  
“Hey.”


	28. Version 1.5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He needs her to live, to be able to fight and to protect, and she needs to be able to do that no matter what. Whatever it takes. 
> 
> Originally posted to Livejournal in February 2012

When she says cancer, it throws her off balance enough for the hardened mask to slip and fall to smash on the silent floor, lost to trembling fingers.  She is no cyborg slayer then on that porch, no mother of the future, no warrior woman.  Just human in all its infinite weakness and vulnerability.  Cameron leaves her there and goes into the house to John.  
  
Cancer.  She imagines it eating at her, growing inside, turning her body against her.  It lingers, a sickening fear at the back of her mind, a hard knot at the pit of her stomach - _and oh god, was that a lump?_ \- even as the tests come back clear.  There are scars: nuclear exposure and a conversation that makes her think that for one clear, terrifying second she understands Cameron.  _("Am I just a bomb waiting to go off?"  "I don't know.  Am I?")_   The moment stays with her.  
  
"You're sick," she says and Sarah believes her because she can feel it, real this time.  "I can help you," she says and Sarah believes that too because the cyborg's message reminds her of another carried across time for her.  Sarah says yes because the other John asks her to and because _her_ John needs her.  He needs her to live, to be able to fight and to protect, and she needs to be able to do that no matter what.  Whatever it takes.  
  
Whatever it takes.  It joins her list of personal mantras, magic words that keep her sane.  (There's a tiny truth she will never admit and it's that she doesn't want to die.)  
  
It starts with cancer but it doesn't end there.  A broken femur is mended and reinforced with coltan alloy Cameron forges in the shed.  A shattered hand is designed a replacement, synthetic nerves and conductors weaving and connecting with her own.  A vengeful knife slides past ribs and into lung; the procedure is long and delicate and Sarah doesn't ask when the artificial organ was grown.  She doesn't ask how.  Cameron still heals faster than she does, but she heals faster than she should, faster than John.  
  
She asks Cameron to do the same for her son, to give it to John too but she refuses and says it isn't time.  
  
Sometimes she wonders what John thinks.  He never says anything but he doesn't stop her, doesn't stop either of them - but she sees the way he looks at Cameron, the way he touches her - and she thinks that maybe he loves her a little better this way.  He must, because she is stronger now, she will live now, she can fight now.  She can protect him, protect the world.  
  
Except she can't.  Judgment Day is coming and they cannot stop it but she will survive, Cameron assures her.  This is what John wanted.  They are her mission.  
  
The last one takes the longest.  She doesn't need any convincing because the wound is deep and long and there is no other choice.  Cameron cuts into hair and skin and bone and brain.  The interface is clean and seamless: perfect.    
  
Sarah wakes up _different_ but doesn't know it until Cameron says “You're ready now” and John takes her hand and she can't quite read the truth in his eyes the way she used to.  It feels like a loss, a pang somewhere deep in her heart, but sacrifice is the nature of motherhood and Sarah's truth is that John needs her.  Her son needs her and she will not fail in this; whatever it takes.  
  
 _Machines, Sarah, machines._  
  



End file.
